


Ascesis

by hedgerowhag



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (this is NOT the viking au u are thinking of), Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Vikings, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Blood and Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Featuring: a bunch of nazgul looking idiots, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Serious Injuries, Sexual Assault, Slow Burn, and very fun totally not dangerous bonding trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2018-11-28 06:43:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11412414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgerowhag/pseuds/hedgerowhag
Summary: There is a moment of uncertainty as the faceless stranger watches Hux from the mount of their red stallion. Then, suddenly, the voice breaks through once more and tells him, “Then you will travel north with us until our path ends in Uppsala.”There are brief mutters as the ghoulish company whispers around Hux, but he does not listen as an unbidden smile crooks his lips.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> since y'all suddenly got interested in viking aus i decided to dig this file out from my pile of abandoned shit from summer 2016. if u are here for braids, marriage and anglo-saxons. this isnt it
> 
> this is a shit chapter but i'll come back to posting once i have all the drafts finished bc BOI. how was i once able to bash out 6k per chapter

Pale light falls through the open shutters into the room. She sits at the table, legs askew, jaw propped by a fist, eyes hidden by drooping lids as she watches the flickering candle stubs.

Dogs yap outside, a horse is beckoned on as wheels crunch through the mess of dirt and stone. Wood clatters and children laugh as their feet patter through the muck.

She turns, her red hair catching light, and looks to the high window where the cool light seeps. A hand absently plays with the strings of beads and medallions on her neck – each a familiar shape skipping through her fingertips.

“Mother?”

She turns to the darkness, her pale eyes searching until they meet their green-blue echoes.

“Hux,” she calls him by the childhood name. “I was waiting for you. Come here.” She reaches out a hand as a tall man approaches her from the doorway.

Underneath the hood the woollen coat, his hair is just as red as hers and skin just as white. But her sons hand feels rough against his mother’s soft palms.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

“Yes, almost.” She pauses and rubs her thumb over the sharp knuckles of her son’s hand. “I wanted to give you something.”

“What is it?”

Her hand slip away as she takes up the bundle of fabric on the table. She squeezes her fingers over it before offering the bundle to Hux. “A gift.”

Hux looks at the wrappings and tilts his head, confused, but he can’t help the slight smile. “Is there an occasion?” he asks.

“Does there need to be an occasion for me to give a gift to my son?”

“No… Of course not.”

The fabric is pressed into Hux’s hand and he can feel a rigid shape through the layers.

“Go on, take a look,” his mother urges, watching with a smile.

So, he unfurls the bundle and allows a disk of bronze to slip onto his open palm. Placing the cloth aside, Hux inspects the gift.

On one side, there is a large pin pierced through the disk and on the other is a round piece of amber like a bead of honey. Around it, Hux traces the cut shapes of running wolves that bite on each other’s tails. It is difficult to make out their shapes, but they stare at him from the weaving knots.

“Do you like it?”

Hux looks at his mother with a smile. “Yes,” he says. “It’s beautiful.”

He wants to scold her for how much it must have costed to have the smith make such a thing, but he keeps his tongue when he sees the relief on his mother’s face.

Doors clatter in the hall of the longhouse, footsteps march across the floors as the murmuring masses gather.

“We should go,” says Hux, looking to the doors.

“Yes, we should.” His mother stands and takes the brooch from his hands. She pushes back the hood of Hux’s coat and carefully pins the brooch to the collar.

“Your father will be waiting,” she says as she takes Hux by the arm, settling her weight against him.

The hall is crowded with villagers from wall to wall, barely leaving space for arriving people to walk through. There are children hoisted up on the shoulders of parents while others climb the supporting columns of the roof, squabbling for a better view of the noble family.

The Jarl rests on a seat of carved dark wood, inlaid with horn and copper in semblance of hounds and sea creatures. Behind him hangs the streaming fabric of red wool and silver wire. Shrouded in his finery of dark furs and gold, Jarl Brendol looks down at the gathered as his wife comes to sit beside him. Their son remains standing at the foot of the dais.

The masses hush as they hear footsteps and clattering of spears outside the Jarl’s hall. Suddenly, the doors open and in strides a procession of armed men, led by their chieftain who looms from his great height. They all come forth bearing shields painted blue and white, tall spears that dare to touch the rafters and copper embossed helms that gleam in the firelight.

Brendol stands from his seat and steps down from the dais, holding his arms outstretched to the foreign travellers. “My friends!” he calls. “Welcome to Fjallstad. We are all glad to have you.”

Their audience shifts as they trying to gain a better look of the strangers that have come to their chieftain. Particularly, they stare at the towering pale Jarl that comes forward with a broad grin of red wormy lips and clasps Brendol in a welcoming embrace. The men clap each other on the shoulders as they step apart.

“We have all anticipated your arrival and are thankful to have you here, safely,” declares Brendol. “You must be tired, so come and eat. There is so much to speak of.”

“Then let us make this a fine evening as we feast,” says the other and his men cheer as they follow the pale Jarl through the hall.

The crowds close around the train of followers as the fervour of the evening begins: attendants clear the hall and begin to arrange tables and benches, pushing forward seats for the honoured guests. As the servants and thralls begin to carry in plates of food and pitchers of drink, the children weave between their legs, yelping and yapping in wonder as they catch the sight of the carcasses of a wild boar being carried in.

It does not take long for people to become settled, losing themselves in conversations with the arrived warriors of the foreign chieftain. They all listen with sharp intent as they hear of the northern lands and the exploits of the foreign countries across the Baltic and the Khurasanian sea.

Walking the length of his father’s table, Hux observes the hall, listening to the fleeting words in his careful expectation of hostility. As his father refused to say much of the visit, Hux attempts to guess how long will their supplies last before they must use their winter reserves for the guests.

Hux is halted by a hand on his arm. Looking down, Hux observes the large red fingers with cracked knuckles gripping his forearm. He follows the hand up to the pale Jarl and his bloated face.

“And who are you, boy? Strolling as if a lord,” the man demands. His water pale eyes squint at Hux.

A scowl imbeds itself on Hux’s lips as a retort curls on his tongue.

“Ormarr,” Brendol interrupts before Hux could form a word. “I was meaning to introduce you both very soon. This is my son – Armitage. Though you might hear he prefers to call himself _‘Hux’_.” Brendol’s eyes catch his son’s with something cautioning in their look.

Hux wrings away his arm and steps back.

“How did I not see it?” Jarl Ormarr laughs, considering Hux like a dog on a leash. “You really are your father’s son.”

“What else am I expected to be?” Hux grimaces and walks away from the Jarl’s side to sit beside his mother.

Thumbing the beads around her neck, she keeps her eyes fixed on the table. Her lips are beginning to become bloody again from biting them.

Hux tries not to watch her too closely, turning his eyes to the fleeting servants. Trying to comfort his mother will only make her worse; if touched without caution she will flinch and stare with frightened pale eyes that cared Hux enough as a child, if spoken to with a  too harsh voice she might panic and lose her own words.

There is a brief touch of Hux’s arm that catches him in his contemplation. He glances to his mother in concern and sees her nodding briefly to the conspiring Jarls.

“Look,” she mouths.

Hux rests his elbows against the table and leans forward to see where his mother gestured.

Beside Jarl Ormarr’s impressive figure are seated three guests: two young men and a girl. They must be his children as the brothers eat with the same appetite as him, ravishing every plate as grease splatters down their chins and hands. However, their focus is not on the cups or the plates. Instead, their eyes scuttle about every face, every piece of finery whether it is a chain of silver or the inlaid pommel of a sword.

Suddenly, the eyes of the brothers’ fleet to Hux, falling to the glint of the brooch at his throat. Hux turns aside his stare, looking to the girl instead.

The Jarl’s daughter is a meeker sight as she doesn’t touch anything that is placed in front of her, only taking small sips of watered ale. Perhaps only at thirteen years, she is a tiny thing that is swallowed by furs that have been wrapped around her shoulders like they can protect her from all the cruelty of the world.

Hux leans back in his seat and looks at his mother, but she has already turned away as she drinks lightly from her cup.

Soon, she excuses herself from the table and Hux is left to his father, growing bored of watching the people become drunk and tell idle gossip.

When Hux stands from the table to retire, Brendol takes hold of his wrist and says, “Stay.” He watches his son until he sits. “Our business is not yet finished.”

The night passes like dripping sap and the crowds finally begin to clear from the tables, stumbling out with drunk giggles and songs.

When there are only few stragglers in the corners of the hall, the father and son sit beside the fire amongst the rows of gathered benches. It is dark outside and there is a chill of autumn in the hall that is visible on the breath and rising bumps of skin despite the red glowing coals.

Lumbering, Jarl Ormarr approaches the father and son. His large bulging frame is unsteady from the Eastern summer wine that he drank and with every step it seems as if he will topple. His daughter follows the man at his heels, keeping her furs held tightly.

“A great evening it has been,” Brendol says with a stretched smile as he turns to Ormarr. “Shall we introduce the betrothed? It is soon enough.”

Hux strains not to stare at his father. Bare toothed protests coil on Hux’s tongue as he watches the girl – hating himself for not realising earlier.

“Seems so.” Ormarr grins, showing his wine stained gums. He falls onto the bench beside the other Jarl. “Holfre can’t wait to meet her husband to be!”

But as Hux watches the girl, she only shakes in her meagre frame and stares at Hux with wide tearful eyes as she realises what will happen to her.

Hux glances at his own father, but the man is peeling back the girl’s worth with his eyes.

“Come, come!” calls Ormarr to his daughter. “Let them see you!” And yet the girl remains frozen, resisting her father.

Growing impatient, Ormarr grasps hold of the girl by the sleeve of her trembling arm. The force of her father’s pull forces Holfre to lose her footing and drop her grip on the tightly held furs.

Beneath, like a necklace of foreign jewels, bruises brace the girl’s neck. The yellow, green and purple slips down her collarbone to her chest.

It takes a moment for Holfre to wrap the fur back around her shoulders, but it is enough for Hux to see what was not intended for him.

“Useless girl!” Ormarr curses, grasping his daughter by the long braid of pale hair and shacking her. “Be gone, you!”

With the slam of his wide palm on the girl’s back, Ormarr sends her fleeing through the hall.

“What an unruly girl,” absently comments Brendol.

“Only shy. Stunned at the kindness,” Ormarr assures.

“Perhaps.”

A wide yawn stifles Ormarr’s next words. “It has been a long day,” he says eventually. “I think I will retire for the night.”

“Yes. Rest well,” Brendol mutters, watching the pale Jarl stand with a groan before trudging away through the hall with drunken mutterings.

After the man has disappeared, Brendol takes a heavy swallow of his ale and notes to his son, “Timid girl, his daughter. She will make a good wife to you.”

Hux turns to his father and narrows his eyes. “You never asked me for my opinion.”

“Your opinion?” Brendol laughs. It is a cold sound, like stone grinding against stone. “Your opinion has no importance in this matter.”

“If I am to marry, then it concerns me and I expect you to ask me, father. Making me marry that girl you may as well be asking me to be a wife to one of the Rus farmers,” Hux argues, his words sharp, but he is silenced by his father’s cold glare.

“You are not a child, Armitage,” Brendol tells him. “You are a man grown. I had expected you to have a wife and children by this age. But you have disappointed me.”

Hux says nothing. He will do nothing to interrupt his father’s words; though he is an old man with swallow skin stretched over fragile bones and dimming eyes, Hux will always know to fear him.

“You are an embarrassment.” The metal of the ale cup clangs against the rim of the fire pit where it is left for the thralls to collect. “You still cling onto your mother, although no longer a suckling. It is time for you to be a man.”

Hux flinches and then, in a softer voice, asks, “But perhaps you will reconsider your choice of wife?”

There is another laugh, sharp and rough. “You will marry the girl by the turn of the season. There is no question in this.” Brendol stands from the bench, crooked like a famished dog. “It will be an advantageous marriage and you will thank me.”

Hux says nothing as his father leaves.

It does not take long for the remaining lingering individuals bound around the hall to follow the lead of their chieftain and retire to their homes.

With a heavy groan, Hux presses his hands against his face, scraping nails over the weather worn skin. Leaning forward, he feels the jewelled pommel of the dagger at his hip press against his ribs.

Hux reaches to his belt and unsheathes the dagger. He holds it at the dying fire amongst the arranged benches. The light dances through the red stone on the pommel, shifting and twisting the shadows inside it.

The blade was never meant for Hux; it was a gift for his legitimate half-brother after his first raid in Francia. But death took him in an unfortunate and foolish duel. So, the dagger was given to Hux and now he is made to fit the footsteps of a man who by ten years exceeded him, a man who was groomed to be the heir of the Jarldom from the day of his birth.

The dagger is thrusted into the timber of the bench, sinking in with a sound thunk.

Perhaps, this is a punishment to his father for not being the man he was meant to be. Perhaps, it was fate that took the heir away from the Jarldom and left behind Hux. But he knows that it is just the bitterness whispering inside his head.

Hux stands and wrenches out the dagger from the bench, sheathing it as he looks around himself. The hall is set in the twilight of the dying fires and the shadows shake in the faint flickers of the smothered embers. He surveys the last evidence of the crowds that filled the benches as he leaves the communal hall into the corridor separating the rooms of the building.

With creaking footsteps, Hux passes the door of the rooms that belong to his mother. He wants to ask her if she knew about the arrangement before this night, but she must be asleep. He doesn’t want to disturb her peace.

Ahead, in the dark, there is a sound – a whisper of cloth, a patter of feet.

Hux halts and then there it is again. That sound. Looking through the murk, Hux sees the fleeting scrap of pale cloth flicker in a doorway.

Perhaps it is nothing, just a night wanderer, but Hux does not reconsider as he stalks towards the disturbance.

“It’s him!” a girl’s voice hisses. “Get inside!”

Another flutter of the pale dress and Hux sees Holfre standing in the doors of her room. Beside her, there is an older girl who glares at Hux with hard eyes through the twilight.

Hux steps forward to ask if they are in need of anything, but Holfre’s breath hitches and she is gone inside the room.

The other girl – a thrall? – stands at her post, hands clenched in skinny fists.

“Don’t you dare touch her,” the girl spits at Hux and follows Holfre’s footsteps, slamming the door behind her.

Hux waits a moment as the footsteps of the girls fall silent, leaving the faint gasps of words to reach him. Yielding nothing, he turns and walks away.

A door opens behind Hux, creaking gently as if touched by wind, and he quickens his pace.

“Looking at the girl before you decide to take her?”

Hux pauses, wondering how Jarl Ormarr hadn’t collapsed the moment he reached his room. Perhaps the entire display was feigned.

“Of course,” replies Hux with a glance over his shoulder to the man standing in the doorway who is dressed in nothing but a night shirt. He appears just as giant as he had in the hall surrounded by his spear bearers.

“Don’t waste your time,” scoffs Ormarr, arms crossed over the bulging expanse of his chest. “She will be the only thing you will ever be offered.”

“I wanted to see the extent of the damage.” Hux turns and steps toward the Jarl, holding his expression nonchalant.

“Oh, she is damaged, I am afraid.” Ormarr considers Hux, raising his bullneck chin to level himself above the young man. “But you, Brendolson whelp, should be thankful for what you are given.”

Hux bares his teeth, feeling the cracks his calm is beginning to bear. “You can’t insult me in such a way,” he spits.

A sudden force crashes against his neck and squeezes around his throat, choking him. Hux grasps at the holding weight, clawing into it with the cracked ridges of his nails. But the hand squeezes, crumpling his throat and Hux feels his head become lighter.

Hux kicks his legs, striking his heels into the thickness of the meat that he is able to reach. With a sudden lurch, Hux is thrown through the open door of the room behind the pale Jarl where he collapses across the floor.

“I will do as I wish. I will insult you and the scum of your family,” Ormarr tells him, bending down to let his cloying breath beat against Hux’s face, “and nothing will change this.”

Hux chokes on the thick, hot air as he is thrown down onto his chest and his wrists are twisted behind his back before being hauled off the floor. Hux is flung down onto the bed where he grasps for a chance to breathe.

Hearing the Jarl’s footsteps, Hux rushes to climb onto the other side of the bed and place distance between them. But a knee is pressed down into Hux’s back, forcing him to crumple under the weight.

In fury, Hux kicks as the man presses down on his spine. He twists underneath him with howls of profanities that fall from between his bared teeth. But his protests become silence when a wide hand pushes Hux’s face against the mattress, smothering him when he screams.

“I will prove it to you,” hisses Ormarr, his breath hushing against Hux’s neck, “that there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

It appears useless to struggle as a hand tears Hux’s clothes. The stitching gives away with shrieks and the woollen eases open in sighs. It would just be easier to lie pliant and wait until it is all over, leaving the consequence to deal with later.

Something sharp and unforgiving digs into Hux’s side, burrowing deep against his ribs underneath the shreds of his coat.

Lying in the torn rags, Hux listens to the sound of fabric shifting. Biding for the moment he is free, Hux surges from the mattress and uses the abrupt movement to grab for the hilt of the dagger at his hip, twisting under the weight on his back before the Jarl returns his hold on him.

Hux strikes blindly into the dark and the cry of pain comes.

The bed shifts as Ormarr pulls away, spitting curses as something patters onto the floor. Hux quickly sits up on the bed and listens to the footsteps in the darkness.

“Useless whelp!” the man howls. “Couldn’t lie just like the bitch you are!”

The Jarl’s feet shift as he reaches forward to grab Hux, but the blade slashes him across the forearm. In the faint light of dying coals, Hux sees the rivulets of red run down the man’s shirt, covering him in blooms of red.

Blind to the pain, Ormarr charges forward and grasps the wrist bearing the dagger. With the other, he twists the copper of Hux’s head.

Hux screams as the roots of his hair are wrenched from his scalp, forcing him to bear his neck. He strikes his nails across Ormarr’s face, scraping them over the skin, feeling the slick wetness of an eye beneath his fingertips. He gauges, feverishly digging his jagged nail into the socket.

A howl comes from the throat of the man as if a dog has been crushed under the hoof of a horse after biting at the ankles. Suddenly, Hux is free.

Taking the dagger in both hands, Hux thrusts it forward. A breathless gasp follows and Hux feels the shaft pierce the fat swells of a bulging gut. Pushing forward, he twists the blade and pulls it across before yanking it free.

The large shadow of the Jarl convulses as he grasps for something on his stomach. He takes an unsteady step away from the bed and then a dull crash comes from the floor.

Moments slip through the room and there is nothing but the hitched breaths of Hux’s panting as he remains kneeling on the bed in the ripped shreds of his clothes.

In the weak light of the room, Hux looks down on the dagger in is hand and smiles, teeth covered in a wash of red from breaking against the inside of his mouth. Hux presses the hilt to his lips and laughs faintly.

When Hux stumbles from the bed, holding the remains of his coat in hand, he feels he shape of the Jarl’s limp arm against his foot. He looks down and sneers, curling his reddened lips.

“May Hel take you.” Hux spits on the man and turns to the door, clenching the dagger in his hand as it weeps blood.

Striding through the hallway, Hux bears no concern for his sharp footfalls in the barren darkness. His march pounds the floor until he meets the door of his room and falls through, failing to close it behind him.

Hux throws down the tatters of his clothes, shrugging off the remains of his coat. He halts when he hears a heavy thump land on the timber floor and kicks aside the torn wool with the tip of his boot.

Between the folds, Hux sees the glint of his mother’s gift. Gently, he takes the brooch and holds it in his palm, warming the metal as he steadies himself.

The consequence of killing a Jarl will not be idle. With two sons to claim vengeance and followers at their call, it’s all too clear what Hux must do.

There aren’t many fine possessions to Hux’s name, but there are enough to provide him with silver and bronze to exchange for shelter and food. So, he gathers the rings, the torques, medallions and foreign coins, throwing them into a satchel with the brooch and bundled clothing. The dagger he cleans and returns to its sheath.

Replacing his tunics, Hux retrieves a coat of heavy leather lined with fur and redresses himself. His hands show the faintest tremors as he straps the satchel and sword in its scabbard across his back.

Swiftly, Hux leaves and steals past the rooms of the sleepers into the hall. The embers in the coals are long dead and all lies in the settled night.

The doors of the Jarl’s hall groan as Hux pushes against them and the iron hinges howl in the chorus of frightened voices. The night air rushes inside, brushing against Hux’s burning skin.

The moment is broken when Hux hears a choked breath. Looking down, he sees the frightened face of a boy. With wide eyes and an open mouth, the dark boy stands frozen at the doors with a pitcher of water clasped in his shaking hands.

In the shadow of the door, Hux reaches for the hilt of the dagger at his hip. The boy has seen nothing, heard nothing, but Hux can’t choke down his own fear that someone had seen his bloodied hands. Nobody would believe him if he tried to reason.

“It’s very late,” Hux tells the boy. “You should be inside.”

The child slowly nods, flinching when Hux steps aside to let him into the longhouse.

“Go inside,” he beckons, keeping one hand on the door to hold it open.

The boy passes Hux warily. His back is entirely exposed, his neck as fragile as a leveret’s. Hux cinches his grip on the blade.

The metal hinges grind as the two halves fall back into place, allowing Hux a brief glance into the house before he is shut out. The faint footsteps of the boy reach him and disappear.

Alone, Hux takes the moment to breathe and settle his mind. He has until sunrise for Ormarr to be found, perhaps past midday before the news spread to other settlings. It will be no use to take horse; it will be no help on the paths Hux takes through the forest.

“Have strength,” Hux mutters as he turns to the absent streets.

The crowded huts loom over him with hollow eyes in the faint moonlight. With the ground soft from the rain, Hux’s footsteps are barely heard as his shadow fleets amongst the narrow streets, taking the shortest path to the outer walls of the settling.

Circled by a wall of wooden stakes, the Jarl's longhouse and the surrounding homes stand on a low hill, rising above the pastures that lie around it. Further away, among the fields strewn by mud roads, there are sparse farmsteads, scattered huts and then the fields that are cut away by the girdle of the woods.

Hux stands below the tall creaking pines, his feet touching the edge where the pastures end and the tangle of the ferns and brambles begins. Ahead, there is no path, no light to lead him. There is no turn that will show him the road.

Blind and naïve, Hux traces his path with his hands as he raises his fingertips to the bark of the pines, holding on when the brambles tangle around his ankles.

In the depth of the darkness, there is no way to tell how far Hux has travelled but the deep aches in his body as the gentle slope drops away into a steep hillside overgrown by spruce. Only by catching himself on the shelves of moss and the insteps of the trees Hux manages to find his way to the foot of the valley where the river cuts through the ground beneath the canopy of trees.

The water seems black in the forest twilight, crested by the white face of the moon as it coils and churns. Hux walks the river bank, watching the water for a sign of rocks protruding from under the surface that he could cross.

Once his path is cut away by the steep rise of a tall crumbling bank, Hux is forced to walk through the stream where the currents flow strong and the rocks slips under his feet. Stumbling in the darkness as he fights against the stream, Hux slowly makes his way through the river.

Climbing onto the bank in his sopping clothes, Hux notices the sky grown light with the peeking spells in the east that bloom pink through the clouds. Exhaustion is finally beginning to break over him and Hux knows that he won’t be able to take another step having no rest or food all night.

With nothing to keep him warm but the clothes on his back, Hux collapses under a tree, holding the satchel and sheathed sword to his chest with his arms and knees. He closes his eyes, unaware as he begins to drift.

 

 

The light of dawn creeps through the forest, breaking through the foliage onto the ground as shadows circle the trees. Below, on the soft bed of moss and pine needles, wrapped in the cover of dreams, sleeps Hux.

The wear of the journey has left him ignorant to the passing of day and it’s only the slight shift of the sword in his hand that wakes him.

At first, Hux only groans and turns against the bark of the pine, determined to ignore the disturbance. But then, a shadow falls on him and Hux’s eyes, blind with sleep, open.

A crouched dark figure is looming over Hux, the face lost under a heavy cowl and body swathed by black fabric. A gloved hand is braced on the hilt of the sword Hux is clutching.

In a burst of fear, Hux surges from where he slept and wrings the sword from the intruder’s hand, pushing them back. With the scabbard abandoned, Hux holds the blade out in front of him, maintaining distance between himself and the intruder.

The stranger cocks their head and reaches for the axe at their belt. They heft it in one hand and there is not a breath of exertion as the weapon is swung up in an arc and brought down onto Hux.

The axe is caught by its curve at the last moment, trapped on the width of Hux’s sword before it is wrung out of the way. They share blow for blow as Hux pushes the stranger out into a clearing between the trees, pressing in as he aims cuts to the open sides as the axe is brought onto him with merciless strength.

In a breath of luck, Hux is able to kick the intruder in their stomach and throw them against a tree. It is enough for the stranger to lose their stance and abandon their focus when Hux takes hold of the axe handle in their hand, shoulder the braced arm and throw the attacker over his back onto the ground with the momentum of weight.

Dazed and unmoving, the attacker lies with their arms splayed out. There is no breath of hesitation as Hux takes up his sword in both hands and thrusts the blade into the stranger’s unprotected chest.

A turn of the steel and a gulp of pain. The blood gushes steadily onto the moss as Hux wrenches free the sword and swipes the gathered droplets of sweat on his brow with the back of his arm.

Returning to the place of his sleep, Hux sheaths his sword and retrieves the satchel before slinging both onto his back.

Not a step Hux makes from the place before he hears the thunder beat of hooves pounding across the forest floor. A flash of light and he sees them, the seven mounted figures racing among the trees, scattering sun on the hind of the horses and the black cloaks of the riders.

Hux’s breath seizes as he watches the ground rip apart beneath the hooves of the rearing beasts. A flicker of panic passes through his mind and he is racing through the trees, scarcely thinking before each step as his feet strikes across the moss.

Over fallen trees Hux leaps, barely touching the ground with his feet as they patter down the slope, over stumps and the mossy mounds. But it all seems useless as the sound of frenzied hooves chases his heels, gaining with every step.

A dark form cuts across Hux’s view, forcing him to dig his heels into the grass as he halts sharply, almost falling.

Panting for breath, Hux watches the dark rider weave circles before him. He goes to lurch away but a spear point is pressed against the back of Hux’s neck as quickly becomes surrounded by the twin shapes of shrouded figures riding on wild-eyed horses.

Hux darts for an opening between the meandering riders, but stumbles when the ghouls crowd on him, unsheathing their blades that tip toward his throat.

“You kill our companion,” says a rider, cantering their horse onto Hux, “And you expect us to allow you to run?”

Perhaps Hux is mishearing, but the voice belongs to a woman. But he cannot be sure; all their faces are hidden under layers of thick cloth bindings and the shadows of their heavy cowls.

“I had hope,” rasps Hux, watching each stranger circle him.

“And we admire your will,” says another, perhaps a man who is holding an axe all too close to Hux’s neck. “But it is time for you to pay the price.”

The axe is swung skyward and Hux knows he has only moments. So he collapses on his knees and cries out, “Wait!”

There is nothing. Not a sound but the panting of horses, not a feeling but the breeze on his skin.

“Wait,” Hux whispers.

“Just because you halted us it does not mean your death is not inevitable,” tells him the rider holding a notched bow.

“No-one’s death is not inevitable,” Hux speaks, stumbling to his feet. “But if you let me live…” He feels giddy as the thought floods his mind.

“If we let you live?” someone prods impatiently as the riders continue to circle like crows around a carcass.

“If you let me live and allow me to travel with you, safely, as far as possible from here, I will pay you.”

It seems to catch their attention. The dark company shares glances among each other.

“Not good enough,” someone barks and Hux sees the shadow of a raised sword.

There is nothing else that he can do but brace himself against the fall of a blade as he curses himself for his own stupidity.

Hux waits for the blade, squeezing his eyes and biting down on his tongue.

But it never comes.

Confused and aching from the flood of fear, Hux opens his eyes and looks up.

Before him, one of the riders is holding their raised fist. The gesture has stopped his death sentence. The dark hollow of their face gives nothing up of their thoughts and neither do their words when they speak to Hux in an unnatural, deep voice.

“What can you pay us with?” demands the commanding rider.

Keeping his eyes on the masked stranger, Hux reaches for the satchel on his back and produces an arm ring of silver.

Seeing the finery, the rider approaches and plucks it from the outstretched hand. After becoming inspected, the ring quickly disappears under the dark cloak.

“And the rest?” the stranger demands.

“I will give you the rest on the journey if you guarantee my safety.”

There is pause of silence before the rider speaks again. “We can simply kill you and take it.”

“But you won’t!” argues Hux. “It will be dishonourable! Think how it will look to the Gods.” He had never thought that he would turn to the rantings of the inane for help. But it seems to have struck sense.

There is a moment of uncertainty as the faceless stranger watches Hux from the mount of their red stallion. Then, suddenly, the voice breaks through once more and tells him, “Then you will travel north with us until our path ends in Uppsala.”

There are brief mutters as the ghoulish company whispers around Hux, but he does not listen as an unbidden smile crooks his lips.

“But.” The word rings, catching the attention of Hux and the meandering riders. “You will only come if one of us is willing to share their saddle with you.” The dark figure looks around nonchalantly. “Since the horse of the one you killed has been lost.”

And so, with a laugh, the leader turns the mount and gallops away across the moss. The others follow, splitting around Hux like the stream of a river around an island.

Hux musters a drop of dignity against his disappointment. But then, hoof beats patter beside him as the flank of a dappled mare comes into view. An outstretched hand is offered to Hux.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ydnsm told me it would probs be a good idea to add a glossary for fancy shmancy words i yanked out a textbook so here it is. comment and ask to add something if ive missed it
> 
> Yggr – a name for Odin that can be translated as “the terrible one”
> 
> Ægishjálmr – helm of awe, protects the wearer by creating an illusion of fear in anyone who sees it
> 
> Bygd – a term for a village or a town with sparsely spread out houses
> 
> Kufic – Kufic is just a term for a type of Arabic script and these silver coins that came from the east are referred to as Kufic coins. This is an umbrella term since I wasn’t sure exactly which coins would be used in this time period (late 9th century)
> 
> Dökkálfar – Dark elves
> 
> Danir – the Danish nation
> 
> Svíar – the Swedish people
> 
> Winter Nights – a festival that marks the first three days of winter during which the dísablót is carried out by the chieftain of the nation in the hall of Uppsala which carries a religious significance
> 
> Dísablót – a sacrifice carried out in public by a community
> 
> Fylgjur – a version of fylgja which comes in the form of a woman to bring a warning or advice to a family (while the fylgja is a representative of a single individual and their future path and appears as an animal) 
> 
> Draumkona – an elaboration of the fylgjur. This term just indicates that the vision of the woman came during sleep
> 
> Æsir – the ruling family of gods in norse myths 
> 
> Þulr – a person who is taught mythic traditions and rituals so that they are able to preserve this information for future generations

They race through the forest hinterlands where the ferns tangle with the brambles and pines grow against each other. The horses kick and pant as if driven by the bites of the hounds of Yggr himself as their masters force them on in the wild chase.

The sound of the hooves is thunder that silences all the wild creatures that hide in the branches of the trees. Even the sky that glances through the foliage seems to grow dark as the horses pass. Hux does not consider his pride as he clings onto the rider whose saddle he shares. He bites through his shouts of fear as the mare fleets through the wide river streams and leaps over the felled trees.

Rain droplets falls through the branches of the crowded trees and it does not take long for the faint spattering to flush a fog through the forest. It is thick like milk and cloying as every breath becomes heavier.

After what seems an age, the riders finally begin to slow their wild race, taking their pace into a canter as the order within their travelling company changes. Hux takes this calm as a chance to release his aching grip on the rider in front of him and lean back on the bedrolls and satchels tied to the end of the saddle.

As the riders interweave amongst each other, passing whispers, Hux studies their bound heads beneath the hoods of rough spun cloth and realises that the dark fabric on their faces is stitched with glass beads, medallions of etched iron, and bone chips that have been sown on in the semblance of chainmail. Some keep their bindings plain, in a foreign fashion that Hux has heard recalled in stories of voyagers who travelled east. However, the rider that holds the lead bears a half helm.

Hux had thought the helm was buffeted with old scratches and dents from battle, but he has realised that those are etchings made to seem like the creases of furrowed brows. The arms of Ægishjálmr glint from the metal in the dim sun from the centre and attached to the edge of the helm is a covering of fine chainmail that hangs away like a veil, covering signs of the wearer’s humanity.

All the riders are dressed in cloaks of rough fabric and armour of boiled leather that has been pulled over heavily embroidered tunics. The riding gloves they wear are adorned with sown medallions and beads of amber that shimmer in the passing light like drops of honey.

It seems peculiar that in cloying fog of the rain that these strangers can breathe at all through the masks that bind their faces. Hux scoffs at their vanity and pride as he pulls on the hood of his coat. He watches the swaying shoulders of the rider with whom he shares the saddle and listen to the ring of their necklaces and chainmail.

Hux knows the voice of the rider, as the company frequently exchanges whispers, but he is still unable to guess whether they are man or woman. While the warrior’s body remains concealed under the layers of rich heavy fabrics and ringmail, their form is an indistinguishable as is their face under the masking bindings.

The rain beats against their backs in the steady trudge as they follow the slope of a valley, taking a faint path between the trees. A brief view opens among the pines of the forest horizon, hazed by the low rain clouds that touch the peaks of the distant grey mountains.

They descend from the slope, miserable under the fat drops of the rain that soaks through every stitch of clothing. The ground grows unstable beneath the hooves of the horses and it is too dangerous to risk another race amongst the trees should the mount fail and fall with the rider. So, the pace is no more than a crawl.

As the ground flattens and the hills fall away, the pines become sparser and the ground sinks between the trees to bare the curves of their black roots. Under the constant beat of the rains the swamp pools have swollen and there is nowhere to step without sinking into the black mud. So, the horses walk sullenly, their shaggy hinds quickly becoming covered in the spraying muck.

Suddenly, the train of plodding horses halts. Leaning from his seat, Hux sees the leading rider hold a raised fist as his masked head tilts upwards to look through the opening in the pine canopy.

At first, it seems as if there is nothing but the grey clouds. But then, after peering closer, a stream of blue smoke comes crawling through the murk.

“If we have not gone too far west,” one of the cloaked foreigners calls, “it will be the bygd.”

The leading rider splits from the company and rounds toward the tail of the train. Hux shifts to face the back of the warrior before him and listens to the approaching clap of the hooves against the water.

The sound seizes with the gulp of the mud, but nothing occurs. Hux turns in the saddle to find the rider, but he does not need to look far as he finds himself staring up into the hollow eyes of the horrific helm.

“It is time to give a share of your payment,” the rider says. His words are distorted by the veils of ringmail and they echo like the rumble of a distant storm.

Hux is taken aback. “Not even a day has passed!” he argues. If this continues, within three days he will have nothing to give but the sparse silver Kufic coins.

“And you will give the payment if you want to see another.” A hand is held out expectantly in front of Hux, offering no chance of dispute.

With a groan of displeasure, Hux reaches into his satchel and palms a torque – silver and decorated with stones of turquoise. Begrudgingly he passes the finery to the gloved hand, letting his fingertips linger on the armring before it is snatched from his reach.

“Ragni,” calls out the master of the company and flings the torque amongst the riders like it’s a piece of rough beaten iron, only to be caught in the air by the hand of a figure at the head of the procession.

“Atli.” The previous payment is lobbed and caught by another hand that belongs to a stranger bearing s spear.

“You will go ahead and see what you can trade for,” the hollow-eyed one tells them. “We will pause here.”

The named riders kick their mounts into a counter and quickly become lost to the thickening sprawl of fog amongst the trees.

There is sharp nudge against Hux’s ribs as the rider in front of him prods his side and tilts their head, indicating that he must get off. The rest of the company has already begun to dismount.

Wincing through the pain his thighs and back from the harsh ride, Hux thumps down into the swamp water. The black mud quickly takes to sucking on his boots as Hux makes squelching steps from the horse, groaning at the at the aches in his stained legs. Behind him, his companion slips from the saddle and softly steps into the water.

The horses are led by the reins from the flooded woodland swamps toward a sheltered patch of moss under crowded pines. The rain has begun to recede, becoming a slight drizzle of must that collects in fat drops on the pine needles.

The bridles are tied to the columns of the trees and the riders tend to the straps of the saddlebags. The horses are heaving and nervously stumbling after being pushed for so many hours without rest. Just as their masters, they sigh for the moment of calm.

Hux stands aside from the travellers, hold his arms tightly about himself as he blinks away the raindrops. He is watching the shifting swaths of black cloaks that glimmer with pieces of a thousand different fabrics when a glove is peeled away and a pink palm and fingers stretch

Hux stares as a rain sodden cowl is shaken off from the vague silhouette of a bound face, veiled by pinned cloth. Deftly, the bare hands unwrap the mask, peeling away the layers, one after the other. It’s the shadows over the eyes that fall away first, uncloaking green, hazel-cast eyes, followed by the arch of a nose and frowning lips. The woman’s hair is shorn at the sides, only leaving a spine of auburn hair in thick coils.

Of course, Hux hadn’t expected the riders to be ghouls or dökkálfar, or spirits, but it seems peculiar to him to find that there are human faces under all those masks.

Hux watches shamelessly as the other riders abandon their guises. He is struck speechless as he attempts to gather their appearances that seemed to have not previously existed under the heavy garments of leather armour and chainmail. There is one other woman amongst them whose skin is darker and eyes are almost black while her nose has a noble curve. By the medallions stitched to the hems of the outer tunic, Hux recognises her as the rider who allowed him to share the saddle. She is a foreigner, but there is nothing to expose it as she talks to others.

Only one of the strangers remains masked: their leader. With the garish helm that peers out from beneath the hood beaded with droplets of rain, he stands aside with his arms crossed across his armoured chest. The hollow eyes watch the movements of the company.

Hux wonders if it is wounds the stranger is hiding. Perhaps they were gained from a voyage to the east, or the west? There are plenty of brave fools who go on expeditions by sea or land to find new paths and perhaps one such adventure had cost this stranger his face.

Hux wants to ask one of the warriors about their leader, but he quickly realises that he doesn’t know their names. Listening to them is of no use; barely a word can be made out of their whispers.

Hux intends to fix this mistake. “What names do I call you all by?” he asks the travellers.

At first, he thinks they cannot hear him over the rain. But then, the voice of a man, the one with oddly broad shoulders and a great height, reaches him through the patter.

“Why does it matter,” he asks without looking from the cargo his horse carries.

“Why—” Hux stutters. “ _Why does it matter_?”

“Yes.” The man gives Hux a withering glare. “Why do our names matter to you?” he bites out.

A brief laugh of disbelief passes Hux’s lips. He steps forward, trying to gather his height against the other man. “If we are attacked during the night,” he says, “and I am the only one who is aware of this, what do I shout to wake you? Or should I leave you to be killed in your sleep?”

“It will not happen.”

Hux looks away and finds the hollow eyes fixed onto him. Like the stare of a carcass, they follow him.

“Besides,” continues the voice from behind the helm, “You will not remain long enough with us for you to require our names.” The words are robbed humanity by the stifling metal, stripped of emotion and left as cold and unforgiving as the masked face.

Hux doesn’t need his words to see the certain smugness dripping from the man that makes him wish there was no helm so he could feel his fist break against his teeth.  But Hux bites down on his tongue and moves away from the warrior with whom he had a spat.

“Fine,” Hux says, as if to signal the closure of the discussion. But then he steps toward the masked one, feeling the eyes on him as he closes the distance of rain swollen ground between himself and helmed ghoul.

When there is only a step left between the faceless leader and him, Hux stops and raises his chin to look ahead at the empty shadows where eyes should be.

“Then, if we are attacked,” Hux says, “I will stand back and you can curse yourself for your stubbornness once you are Hel’s plaything.”

Hux tries not to stumble back when the other man steps forward. Metal glints through the shadow of the cowl and Hux can almost hear the creak of leather as the man’s hands tense and the armour shits under the heavy layers of chainmail and rough fabric.

Grinding his feet into the ground, Hux refuses to move when the man presses closer. With a scowl bared to the featureless mask, Hux reaches for the dagger on his belt and waits for violence to break between them.

“Can you hear that?” one of the women whispers.

Suddenly, bored of their squabble, the helmed rider turns from Hux to his company.

Hux is enraged by the dismissal and his glare hardens as words collect themselves on his tongue in the anticipation of finishing what they have begun. But the sound of hoof beats on the soft ground chases away his thoughts.

“It’s the others,” says one of the riders with indistinct swallow features. “They must have returned.”

Out from between the trees a figure races, splitting the fog as water scatters like sparks from beneath the hooves of the galloping horse. The dark brown stallion halts beside the island of raised ground, panting and snorting as it beats its hooves against the watery soil of the bog. The rider pulls the stallion by the reins, calming him as he rears, bearing teeth.

Discarding the hood of the dark cloak, the rider looks down at the gathered company. The woman’s almost black eyes glint like river stones on the pale plane of her face. Her hair must have been as pale as bone, but it has been shorn away entirely. Dark blue swirls and lines mark her jaw and draw a crest to the space between her brows.

“We were lucky,” the woman says. “They only had the last of their summer harvest, but there was plenty of game from a hunt.”

“Where is Atli?” asks the sallow warrior.

The pale woman looks over her shoulder at the murk. She shrugs and turns back. “Lost him, I think.”

In the distance, there is a faint patter of hooves that dashes through the swamped forest ground. Like a spirit amid the pines, the grey horse appears from the fog, almost gone to the murk if it wasn’t for the dark figure of its rider bearing the spear. Bulging sacks are bound to the hooks on the saddle, swinging with the canter of the horse.

“They were very grateful for the silver and happily parted with their goods!” cheers the rider – Atli. At least that name Hux has grasped, though he struggles to remember what they called the pale woman.

“Then we will continue,” says the leader of the company, “and pause at sunset.”

With the feud forgotten, the riders return to their mounts, unbinding the bridles from the trees. Retaking the saddle of her dappled mare, the foreign woman rounds the horse toward Hux where he stands staring the back of the masked leader with dripping disgust.

Face bare, the woman catches Hux’s eye. Something reluctant appears on her face as she reaches out a gloved hand.

They watch each other, the rider and the exiled wayfarer, as rain patters around them – cloying Hux’s wind strewn hair and the dripping from the edge of the woman’s drawn hood.

Clasping each other’s wrists, Hux allows himself to be pulled on the grey mare.

As the evening passes with the chase, the blue sky peers out through the grey clouds that have been struck orange and yellow by the setting of the sun that hides on the lost horizon. The forest seems boundless, stretching like a sea of pine and spruce. The thickets only grow wilder around the travellers as they cut through the ferns and nettles, weaving through the saplings that grow in the patches of fading light.

They continue through the rain ravaged forest until the last light dies on the peaks of the clouds. Once the company reaches ground clear of flooding, the leader begins to slow the pace, guiding them around the islands of overgrown brambles before gesturing for the company to halt.

There is a clearing among the low spruce, where the tall bodies of the red pines have fallen from a storm, crashing down and destroying anything beneath them. Carpeting of moss and young grass has swallowed the trunks and the patch of ground between them.

Here the company breaks for rest. The horses are tied down on lengths of their bridles as they feed on the offered grain and the surrounding undergrowth while their masters remove the bundles of satchels and bedrolls off their backs.

Overhead, the stars have begun to peek like a scattering of dust across the black fabric of the sky. Wind shivers the peaks of the pines, but it’s so distant it goes unnoticed.

The riders have already pulled on their shelters of waxed linen in the clearing among the trees. Under the heavy foliage of the pine, the ground remains dry and firewood is quickly found. It catches a spark from the strike of the firesteel and a warm glow shelters the travellers.

Discarding their heavy cloaks and armour, the company settles about the fire. Hux slumps against a pine at the edge of the circle, watching with his sore eyes from behind his braced arms as one of the men busies himself with building a spit over the flames. Another traveller, Atli, takes up a sack from the bygd and strips it off to reveal the carcasses of pheasants. Atli plucks the birds and strikes them through the spit that he sets over the fire.

The three women of the company settle close by each other: the pale one on the ground, sprawled out in front of the fire, while the other two curl under a large pelt of brown tattered fur. The men are scattered between the belongings, slumped against the bags as if they are the pillows. The strange slight one sits away from the fire on a broken stump, their cloak dropped around their shoulders like limp wings.

The only one who remains absent is the man who leads the company. He had taken up the bow that belongs to one of the women and disappeared somewhere in the dark among the pine barricades. Hux had watched the low branches close around him until the shadows gave up no more of his receding back. Hux soon forgets about the man as the ebbing warmth of the fire and the smell of cooking meat sinks him into sleep.

In the fallen silence of his dozing mind, Hux wonders if his father will help the hunt for his head, if he will be willing to support the heirs of Ormarr. It would be his duty to bring his own son to the lawspeakers for the apparent attempt to siege Ormarr’s property before fleeing like a coward.

Perhaps his meek mother will try to discourage Brendol from giving aid in the search, but he will not listen to her. It would be safest for her to keep away from the mess of a situation. It was just an impulse mistake.

Holding onto the edges of his sodden coat, Hux presses his face against his knees, sighing as he feels the heat from the fire lap on his frozen hands.

“Now that I think of it… You know… he did have a point.”

Hux peers up and sees the enormous warrior whom he challenged glance down at him cautiously.

“About what?” asks the pale woman.

“He said that we should give him our names. I said that he would not need them,” the man explains, nervous as the others watch him. “But he was right, I suppose.”

“Tell us your name first,” the sallow one tells Hux, with their eyes drooping underneath the drawn hood as if they mean to drift to sleep. “It’s only fair.”

In the race against time and the inevitable, Hux had not thought what he would tell them once this moment comes. If the news had travelled, they will soon know who he is. In the end, it doesn’t matter what Hux tells them because he will be dead whatever path he takes and no matter how far he runs.

“You can call me Hux,” he says.

“Shirin,” says the darker woman, the one who allowed Hux to travel with the company.

“Atli,” the man calls out from his nook among the saddle bags.

“Alva.” She is the one Hux witnessed first undo the bindings of her mask. It is to her that the bow belongs which the leader had took with him to the forest.

Next is the pale woman with eyes like pieces of coal and lines marking her bare skull. “Ragni,” she says with grin and then points to the sallow one. “That is Gunnær.”

“Vikæll,” at last mutters the large warrior who sulks as he watches fat drip from the spit into the fire.

“And the one we follow calls himself Kylo Ren,” explains Ragni.

Most of the names of the warriors are common in the south of the lands and Hux grasps them, asserting them to the faces. However, never before had heard of a man call himself ‘Kylo Ren’. At least, it seems appropriate that he is masked and inhuman.

“Why do you travel with this man to Uppsala?” Hux asks the company.

There is a brief moment as glances are shared. Faltered by the question, some refuse to meet Hux’s eyes, turning their attention to the fire.

“We should tell him,” decides Atli, sitting up from between the bags. Shirin nods in agreement.

“Why?” Gunnær demands. “it isn’t his concern.”

“He won’t believe us.” Alva shrugs.

“Tell me,” insists Hux. “I want to know who I am following.”

Atli opens his mouth, about to speak, but is silenced by Ragni.

“A vision had sent Kylo on this journey,” she explains with a white grin as she leans closer to the fire. “He was given the command in a dream by a cloaked woman.”

The companions watch Ragni, the looks of concern or spite dropping away from their faces as they listen.

“She told him to leave his home among the Danir for the north, the place where the Svíar gather in the time of the Winter Nights for the dísablót,” Ragni tells Hux. “On this road, Kylo must find the path of his future – his purpose you might call it. If he doesn’t, he must offer his life to the Gods and Godesses as Odinn had when he hung from Yggdrasil for nine nights to receive the visions of the runes.”

“You mean he will die?”

Ragni sighs, a reluctant smile pulls at her white lips. “It was a sign from the Æsir. They wish to guide him.”

Hux has heard often of people claiming to have been visited by the guiding spirits of the fylgjur, in the form of woman or beast. These figures come advising favoured families or individuals, telling them of prophecies of their future paths. But it is all just wistful imagining; spirits do not exist beyond eddas and skalds. They are just beautiful wonders.

In the darkness of the woods as the red fire crackles, Hux considers the pale woman. “So, you believe a draumkona has spoken to Kylo?” he asks.

“Yes!” exclaims Ragni as the fire spits a mouthful of sparks. “The Gods have favoured him and they sent him a fylgja through his dreams! They want him on his destined path.”

“How do you know this is true?”

“Kylo has many visions,” says Alva as she stands from the spread of pelts. “They show him the road that we must take to find the safest path.” Unsheathing a small dirk, she jabs it into a roasting pheasant, testing the meat.

“For each vision, Kylo offers a sacrifice as thanks to the Æsir,” Ragni continues. “The visions are never false—”

She halts and frowns across at Hux who is biting down on his lip to muffle a cackle.

“Why are you laughing, you wretch,” barks Ragni

“I am sorry,” Hux chokes out as she claps his hands against his knees, trying to steady himself as laughter continues to burst past his lips. “I am so, so very sorry, but you are all following a madman.”

Hux looks up at the company through his tears; he can’t believe the idiocy of these people, these warriors who he almost mistook for the huntsmen of Odinn who follow him in the wild hunt. Hux wonders how can people possibly believe in such whimsical ramblings.

“How dare you say such things!” Ragni shouts, standing as the fire flickers over her. “The only reason that nothing has happened to any of us on this journey because of him. Do you not believe in the Gods? Do you not believe the words of your ancestors?”

“I have faith in the work of human hands, not lunacy.” Hux smirks, refusing to meet the gesture of impending violence; despite his distaste toward these people, he does not wish to break their truce.

“Calm yourself,” Gunnær tells Ragni, holding her back with a palm to her chest. “It’s not worth the bother.”

“Especially on an empty stomach,” Alva mutters as she turns the spit. “The pheasants are ready.”

There is faint shuffling in the company as Alva produces a metal dish from the bags and begins to cut the birds, the flame hardened skin giving away under her knife with cracks.

Hux feels his own stomach twist as he watches the fire scorched meat pull apart, peeling as the legs and wings are torn away. He hasn’t even since the night of the previous day and he is beginning to feel the painful pull in his gut as the haze of hunger comes over his mind.

As the faint murmurs of conversation settle among the company, the plates of food are passed about along with waterskins and canteens. Unable to resist any longer, Hux edges from where he settled and approaches the company.

A knife is still lodged between the bones of the last pheasant as fat drips down into the hissing embers. Taking hold of the knife, Hux begins to wrench it. But his efforts are halted when the naked blade of a sword cuts in front of him.

Forced back, Hux looks up to see Ragni standing beside the spit, her sword crossed before the fire.

“No, not you,” she says. “Why do you think you deserve our food?”

“You bought it with my silver!” Hux argues, too hungry to consider his pride.

“Which you payed to us to ensure your safety.”

Someone snorts at Ragni’s words and Hux does not force the argument further. Instead, he steps back from the fire and slumps into the place he claimed against the pine. On any other day, Hux would have pressed on against Ragni, but the ride has taken its toll and there is little strength in him to muster the words.

There is a shift in the thickets of the ferns and the low hanging branches of the spruce. A whisper of leaves against leaves as something pushes through them. Hux stares wide eyed into the shadows across the camp, bracing himself as the rest of the company remains oblivious to the sounds.

Branches snap and the bramble thorns run across something with a low murmur. With his sword lying beside him, Hux grasps the hilt and clutches the sheath with the other hand.

Something impossibly dark breaks through the thickets, tumbling out into the clearance to the fire among the trees. There is a hiss and yelp as something furred writhes in a black hand and Hux all but jumps to his feet.

It takes him a moment to realise why none of the other travellers have responded to the intruder. The black mass with its impossible height looks monstrous, but it’s just Kylo – dressed in heaps of leather and steel rings as his face remains covered by a slate of iron beneath his ragged cowl. In his hand there is a fox, twisting and coiling as it kicks its bound legs in a wild attempt to escape the man’s grip.

There is an arrow protruding from the beast’s shoulder. There is no way of saying how Kylo had been able to see the creature in the dark of the night woods to have been able to shoot it.

Slinging the bow from his shoulder, Kylo hands the weapon and quiver to Alva. He then turns as if to walk away but halts, shrouding the ember glow of the fire with his black silhouette. Suddenly, his head tilts toward Hux and the empty eyes stare at him

“You sit alone,” Kylo considers.

Hux does not respond. He glances between Kylo and the writhing wounded vixen in his hand.

“Have you had nothing to eat?” There isn’t a trace of concern in the man’s words. It is merely a curious observation.

“No,” huffs Hux, shifting as he tries to avert the look of the hollow eyes.

There is a sound, perhaps a laugh. It’s difficult to tell when it breaks against the veil of metal links.

“Well,” speaks Kylo, “I promised you safety, not comfort.”

Others laugh at they catch the words. Perhaps they are expecting a fight like the spur of violence between two dogs, but Hux only watches with contempt as the masked warriors turns away. He listens to the footsteps as they are echoed by the pained cries of the captured creature.

Kylo disappears in the shadows and the only sign that he was ever amongst the company is the shiver of the spruce branches where he left the shelter of light.

“Where is going with that poor creature?” Hux asks as he drops back against the pine, watching the darkness between the trees where shadows feign shapes.

“To sacrifice it, of course,” says Gunnær, whose slumped form is barely visible in the flickering light of the fire.

“He pays with blood for the guidance of the Gods,” Ragni mutters, licking a stream of fat dripped down her wrist from her meal.

Hux stares at these people, these homeless mercenaries that follow a self-proclaimed þulr who swears to hold conversation with the Gods.

“That man is a lunatic,” Hux sneers. “And all of you know it.”

After this, the company speaks no more to Hux as they set to clean the last of the bones. Around them, the horses meander with their eyes catching white and green in the dying fire. There is a thick stench of spoiled ale as laughter rises around the fire and words mix into a confused slur of nonsense.

Hux is deaf to the howled laughter as he holds his arms tightly around his middle with his head resting against his knees and slowly sinks to sleep. As the last warmth of the dwindling fire reaches him, Hux thinks distantly of sleeping on his mother’s lap after a day of helping her with the loom when her fingers would lose track on the wool. He thinks of the dogs wandering about his father’s hall before disappearing to the stables where they slept in a snoring heap.

It’s all gone to the past now, but perhaps Hux can linger in those moments. If only for just a little longer.

 

Hunger is a foul taste in Hux’s mouth when he wakes. It aches his ribs and twists his innards like the turn of a knife. He barely manages strength to open his eyes when the sun hits against his eyelids.

Pushing back the hood of his coat, Hux rubs the heels of his palms over his face, groaning at the echoing pain inside his skull. He blinks through the burning morning light and looks down around him as the sun catches on the cold withered grass. The breeze sighs in the high canopy of the pines as the branches bow and rise with the sound of the fleeting birds.

Lying beneath the lumps of fur and blankets under the cover of linen, the rest of the company sleeps. Somebody snores while someone else turns and jostles as they attempt to find a comfortable patch on the ground. It seems the dawn has only just risen.

Hux shivers in the chill of the air and pulls the fur collar of his coat higher around his neck. His legs hurt from being held against his chest the entire night, so he stretches them out across the moss, feeling his heels bump against the sword he left to lie unsheathed.

Slowly, Hux works his mouth open, feeling the dry threads of spit split apart on his tongue. The taste makes bile rise in his throat and his body convulse in disgust.

Something jostles against Hux’s knee. He glances down with sleep sore eyes and sees a wooden bowl abandoned in the moss. It is filled with dark red dried berries and pieces of fruit from a late autumn harvest. Beside it there is a waterskin, bulging from being filled so tightly.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next update will be at the end of the next month! just a warning in case anyone thinks im abandoning this. another warning is that im gonna mr darcy this shit bc i can only take so much seriousness
> 
> glossary (note: i will not type up definitions for words i have mentioned in previous chapters):
> 
> Þursar – the counterparts to the norse gods, often described as giants and are recognised are primordial forces that are potentially evil
> 
> Valholl – Valhalla
> 
> Hof – a communal hall that belongs to the Jarl of a community that is also used as a place of public worship (for example Gamla Uppsala)

After two days of rain clouds chasing the riders, pale autumnal sunlight falls through the branches of the lichen clothed fir onto the path that arches around a mire. They had forced their way in the tall grass and the reeds where the steps of the horses and their masters sunk into the black mud. After crossing the swamps, the company continues on foot beside the train of horses, allowing them to rest while avoiding wasted time on pauses. They eat as they walk, wordless as the forests and fens pass around them.

It took another slow day for the riders to permit Hux into the company. On the second night of his stay among them, they allowed him to sit by the fire and didn’t snarl when he reached for the food or drink. In turn, Hux keeps his opinions behind closed teeth and demands little.

The days always end with the riders huddled around a fire, clumped like animals leeching for warmth. But not once has Hux gained a chance to see Kylo among them. When they halt to rest, Kylo either stands aside like an idol of stone or disappears in the dark – not to be seen until sunrise.

Hux knows that this should only be expected of people who claim to be close to the Æsir. After all, it is through their devoted isolation they hear the whispers of the Gods and the þursar and find signs in the quiet edges of the wild. Hux suppose it is the reason for Kylo’s aloofness that brings him to act like a king among men, a hero with his name memorialised in the skalds.

The sun is beginning to drop as Hux walks beside Shirin’s dappled mare, guiding it by the reins while she sits in the saddle, glimmering in the scorching sun with her medallions. Sometimes, she walks beside Hux and asks him of the Svíar; though she visited these borders on the business of trade, she has never remained long enough to learn of the people.

“Is this how you joined Kylo Ren’s company – when he journeyed south to trade?” Hux asks; he knows very little of the riders and only through fleeting words and observations of their clothes has he learned anything of them.

“No.” Shirin considers Hux sharply. “I have known him for a very long time. My mother was from the east – she was enslaved by the Danir. I was born to her but I never knew her.”

Hux opens his mouth to speak his sympathies, but Shirin quickly silences him.

“Unfortunate. I know. But there is nothing to miss when I never knew it. The noble women of the hall raised me to avoid distracting my mother from her work. This was the Jarldom where Kylo was known as a child.”

“But how did you come to be here? With these people?” If Shirin is just the daughter of a thrall, then who dressed her in ringmail and rich foreign silks. The thrall Rus in Hux’s Jarldom are barely even allowed burlap, dressed finely only to be pleasing to the eye during gatherings in the Jarl’s hall.

“I was given freedom by the women who raised me,” the warrior explains. “I decided leave on sea voyages to trade and take part in raids in the Baltics with the people of my Jarldom. It gained me status and I fought many times for the lands owned by the people that raised me. In those ranks, I came to know this company and among them Ren. In defence of our land, he led us.”

“So he voyaged with you and raided?”

Perhaps Hux was right in his guess that through battles on foreign shores Kylo was robbed of his features that have been replaced by the helm. These people must be of a kind that gain their fortune through battle – unlike Hux’s own Jarldom that prefers to keep to trade, though words of land seizing have been raised by their king.

“No,” Shirin sighs. “He never did.”

Hux looks at her with pale shock. “Why?”

“Before he left his homeland his—” Shirin bites on her tongue, her eyes are fixed ahead. “His status allowed him little freedom. Though his mother herself has been famed for her ferocity in both the Jarl’s hall and field, I think she was too protective of her only son. I’m afraid he never saw true battle besides the outskirts of his mother’s Jarldom.”

“And yet you follow him. You _trust_ him.” Hux finds this stupidity to be blind, to follow a man who has never dealt with enemies beyond his home border.

“Yes,” says Shirin. “I wish to aid him on his journey that leads Kylo to his true cause.”

“Is it the same for all of you?”

“We are faithful to Kylo as our leader,” Shirin tells Hux. “Besides, he has promised that once he joins the Æsir in Valholl he will tell them of us so that they will keep us in their favour.”

Hux looks ahead where the procession trails on as the warriors either walk or ride, plodding dutifully after the dark figure of Kylo Ren. Now, Hux understands: this is a march for the beast that will be sacrificed at the table of the Æsir and these men and women are here to ensure that the offering is delivered so their names may be held in glory.

This is already known to Hux and yet it makes him feel uneasy to follow this march.

They don’t speak again as the travellers continue on the path along the edges of the fens where insects have begun to swarm in the sudden autumnal heat like embers caught in the sun, dancing in dizzy circles.

The company never takes the well-travelled roads that weave through the southern lands to the north – walked by people for generations as they make the same journey to the hof of Uppsala. Though it hinders them as they stumble onto bogs and thickets of brambles among spruce, it allows them save much of the daylight by avoiding the meandering loops of the known paths.

In many ways, the company relies on Kylo to find their way; the soundless forest has scarce signs to tell how far they have travelled, besides the sun that arcs behind the meandering tide of clouds. Hux is familiar with this monotony, having travelled with his family to Uppsala since before his first words.

He recalls that as a small child he would watch from his mother’s lap as nothing but trees, the rivers and fens under milky fog passed around him. Hence, when the green is interrupted by the loom of mountain faces crowned by wisps of clouds looking down at the company through the spruce canopies, Hux realises that something is amiss.

Hux looks to others, but remembers that these places are not familiar to them when their faces don’t yield concern. They must have strayed from their eastward course to avoid a danger foreseen by Kylo when he was visited by the fylgjur. They must be stirring toward their true course soon.

Hux ignores the matter as the day dwindles, but in the setting of the evening, when he looks skywards in a meadow among the trees, he sees the impossible blue facets of the mountains looking down on him. Like rivers, the eroded rock has fallen from the ravines down onto the heather that grows on the foothills.

Stepping from Shirin’s side, Hux marches along the line of the plodding horses. “We are going too far west!” he shouts as he stumbles over the raised roots of the pines.

When he passes by the riders, Hux sees Gunnær and Vikæll grimace at him. But they do not try to silence him as he runs toward Kylo.

“If we continue this way we will be forced to cross the mountains. It will slow us down by days,” Hux explains as he takes the final steps to approach Kylo. The hide of the auburn stallion shifts like liquid as it passes under the sun, clouded by the black mass of the man that has taken the saddle. Kylo ignores the intrusion.

Hux grasps the straps of the saddle bags and he struggles to keep pace. “It’s better to turn east – toward the safest path,” he pants.

“We go west,” Kylo proclaims, barely turning his head to acknowledge Hux. “It is my decision.”

A growl drags from Hux’s tongue as he runs to follow the saddled man. He grabs the reins, trying to yank them from Kylo’s hands.

“Do you wish to ever see Uppsala?” Hux stares at the slate of Kylo’s face of the iron mask and ringed veil. “Or do you want to wander here and there until you age and die? If you want this ridiculous journey to end you _must_ go east – to the marshlands.”

“I will not take these commands from you,” Kylo responds in a bland tone.

“Then from who? From which person who knows this path? Or have you travelled the width and the breadth of these lands? Are you a seafarer and a wanderer? Perhaps you have seen the east and the west and gone to the end of the silk road? Oh but that is right?” Hux laughs as he releases the reins of the horse that has begun to nervously canter. “You have never seen anything but the walls of your mother’s home!”

“Silence!”

Finally, Kylo has turned to look down at Hux. There is no need to see his face to feel his embarrassment and his rage that only surges Hux on.

“Isn’t that right?” A grin lodges into Hux’s lips, vicious in his mockery even as Kylo comes to stand from the saddle. “You are just a petulant, idiotic child that will never listen to anyone as you demand—”

He hears the metal crash to the ground before his mind makes sense of the slash of silver. Lurching away, Hux watches the blade scrape through the dirt at his feet, drawing a line between him and Kylo.

Hux stumbles out of reach when he hears the whistling of the sword swinging through the air. It slashes against the earth, landing a breath away from Hux. Panting, he looks to Kylo who holds his arm coiled in anticipation as the multitude of cloth and metal on him shivers through colour like the back of an adder in the sun.

Yet again, Kylo hefts the sword and crashes it into the ground as Hux flees from the assault, wavering on his feet as he struggles to keep his attention on the whistling slash of silver.

“Fight, you coward!” Kylo howls and pushes Hux on in his relentless charge until he stumbles from the path.

There is not enough time between each cut of the blade for Hux to grasp for the pommel of his own sword that is bound across his back and he is forced to flee. Hux runs between the trees away from the train of nervous horses, catching himself on the bark of the pines as he turns to see if Kylo has followed him.

A crash startles the air. Splinters of wood hit Hux as he reels, staring into his own reflection caught in the polished metal of Kylo’s notched sword.

“Enough!” someone shouts after them, but it does nothing to halt Kylo as he corners Hux like a stalking animal.

“Enough already!” In a brief moment, Hux sees Atli break away from the company, seized with worry. “You have proven yourself! Stop!”

As Hux wavers from the ruthless swings of Kylo’s cuts, he feels his heel catch on a coiled root. The world churns and Hux sees the glint of metal falling after him. The moment stretches and cinches and then Hux’s back hits the earth. His breath is knocked from his chest and he heaves through coughs that seize his lungs.

A shadow drops over Hux and the swaying tops of the pines are hidden behind the gnarled monstrosity of Kylo’s helm. Hux snarls up at him and draws his legs in preparation to run.

“Pathetic,” Kylo spits. His sword taps the ground beside Hux’s head and the felled man flinches when it scrapes along his ear.

“We are not done,” Kylo tells him, and then he is gone with the deft swing of the blade.

Groaning, Hux allows himself to fall lax against the ground and closes his eyes as he feels the deep aches in his back. When he opens his eyes again, Hux sees another figure standing over him. A naked hand is outstretched toward him.

“Let’s go,” says Atli, curling his fingers in a gesture before stooping down and grasping Hux by his forearm and wrenching him to his feet.

The company has moved on when Atli and Hux join their march. They both walk beside the unoccupied grey horse at the rear that is hauling large saddle bags and bound rolls of oiled linen, keeping the beast as a divide between them.

With the thump of Atli’s spear keeping Hux’s mind in the rhythm of the march, he finds himself forgetting the pains that crawl through his ribs and back where the length of his own sword has branded him with bruises from the fall. Atli says nothing to him beside offering a turn in the saddle as the company maintains a calm pace in the set of the evening. Fearing crippling aches, Hux declined and continued to trudge, keeping a tight grip on the straps of the grey horse’s saddle.

They march until night covers the horizon and stars glimpse on the peaks of the mountains that grow over the forest in a monstrous barricade with crags that challenge any human feat. It will be a difficult journey, taking the pass through the mountains as they break for the valleys before descending to the other side, but Hux can do little to discourage Kylo.

Behind the pines and the crooked birches with stripped bark, there is a wide lake that stretches out of view as it curves behind the hinge of the forest. There are reeds scattered on the shore of grey sand and river smoothed stones. With barely any light to travel by, the company is called to a halt.

Half blind in the moonlight, they free the horses and heft off their belongings with numb hands before building a fire out of sight of the lake. The travellers make hasty work of setting out the necessities and finding dry wood to keep the fire burning through the night.

With the weight of his scarce belongings on his back, Hux stands against the narrow stalk of a birch and watches quick scuttling as the camp unfolds. It appears that the day has been equally difficult on all of them as they barely make effort to find anything to eat other than the provisions they opted for while marching.

The path through the mountains will try them, out on the exposed planes of wind scored grass and heather. There will be nothing to hide them, nothing to give them shelter. There is no way of foretelling who they will cross paths with, but what lies ahead must be better than what follows behind.

Lost in the stare of the fire, Hux is not aware of the faint steps pressing through the grass toward him until a sound like a beat of thunder deafens him.

Hux lurches and sees the silver line of a blade struck through the narrow spine of the birch. Without effort, it is wrenched free and drawn back to the wielder. Hux falters back as Kylo follows him in his steps, his armour glimmering in the firelight over his inhuman figure.

A strike whistles through the air, missing Hux’s stomach as he stumbles from Kylo. Another – to his chest. Hux is followed by an arching cut as he tries to run.

Around them, the company has risen to their feet. Eyes follow Kylo as he corners Hux against the fire.

“Kylo—” Hux lurches from a cut aimed for his knees. “Stop being a child!” he cries out as he eludes the uncontrolled path of the oncoming sword.

“I told you,” Kylo snarls as he drags the sword point across the ground and takes the hilt in both hands, “we are not done.”

A thrum of metal and the sword is dashed into the earth where Hux once was.

“Stand and fight me!” shouts Kylo. His movements are becoming more crazed with every moment that Hux runs to avoid him.

Circling the fire as the others flee from the path of Kylo’s mad chase, Hux takes hold of the blade that was impaled by Ragni into the ground. There is no shield to take up and, with no armour, Hux is defenceless except for the hindrances he can find for Kylo.

Hit after hit, their swords meet and scrape against each other as Kylo presses Hux on – forcing their crossed blades toward his neck. This fight won’t last long; Hux feels himself become exhausted and the most he can hope to do is prevent the worst of the damage as he veers around the fire.

Kylo hunts Hux like a wild beast driven on by the signs of weakness. In a moment of blindness, Kylo grasps Hux by his arm and throws him out of the clearance of the tree with the thrust of his knee into Hux’s gut. Dropping into the dirt with a swallowed gasp, Hux rolls over to crawl as his hands shake on the hilt of the sword he is gripping.

“Kylo!” A woman’s voice reaches from the clearing. “Enough!”

Suddenly, Kylo is hauled back by his shoulders and steered from Hux as he begins to run from the light of the fire. But Kylo pushes aside the hands that try to keep him from haunting after Hux without effort and warns them off with the point of his blade. It gives Hux the chance to pull the distance between them.

Other voices join in the cries as they try to call the fight to an end, but they are not heard as Kylo stalks after Hux through the darkness toward the lake – further and further from the light and the voices of the company.

Hux runs blind, catching himself against the trees as he comes to stand on the shore of the lake. He turns back and sees the loom of Kylo’s figure against the faint glow of the fire, too close for Hux to run once again.

Silver glints like the sickle of the moon. Hux flinches are raises his sword, but it is twisted from his hand and throw into the water. It sings against the rocks and Hux stares at Kylo before he lunges to escape.

Something strikes against Hux’s throat and he can no longer breathe. As if weightless, he is lifted into the air by the hold around his neck. He grasps onto the hand that robs him of breath and scrapes his nails through the leather, whimpering and choking like a dog. Sparks fleet in Hux’s eyes, blurred by the pooling tears and he knows that if he does nothing he will lose consciousness.

A sudden, lurching kick to Kylo’s abdomen and Hux is dropped into the lake. The cold water crashes around him and Hux heaves in deep gulps of air as his chest spasms and his vision is dotted with sparks. His heartbeat thumps against the sides of his skull.

A hand is twisted in Hux’s coat and he is wrenched into the shallows of the lake when the weight returns to his neck. It holds him down as Hux thrashes and wheezes as he kicks up the water around them.

In his last efforts, Hux reaches up to scratch his nails into the slate of Kylo’s face, but the grip tightens on his throat and he falls uselessly. Fingers dig into his jugular, pressing Hux down into the water. It seems to Hux as if he has been dragged back into the room and held down against the bed as his clothes are being torn. All Hux can do is keep his eyes shut tightly as he hopes for it to end when his fight dies.

He doesn’t realise when he chokes on the word, “Please—” He strikes out in last effort with his shacking hands against the looming body above him as hands on his throat choke the pulsing hum of blood inside him.

“Please— I ca— I can’t—” Hux whispers, gulping for air that won’t pass into his lungs. He puts his hands on the fingers on his neck and weakly pulls, heaving. “I can’t—”

The pressure eases and Hux feels his chest stutter – he feels the echo of the hands on his throat and the rasp of water crawling toward his lungs. In panic, Hux kicks up his legs, thrashing in the water as he tries to scratch his nails into the attacker, but he finds his arms fixed against the sand.

“Hux!” A voice – unfamiliar and close.

A scream pushes through Hux’s throat. The wild panic drives him blind as he twists his bounds wrists in madness and bones groan when they are forced against each other by the grip.

“Hux! Stop!”

He can’t move, he can’t do anything.

“Stop—! You will hurt yourself!”

A plea – though unspoken, it breaks on the words and finally Hux looks up.

There are eyes that are dark and appear so afraid. They watch Hux from a crooked young face with a soft, downturned mouth that shapes his name. The deformed, gnarled helm is lost in the dark. It’s just the boy’s petrified features crowned by the night sky.

“Stop,” the boy whispers and though Hux thinks he has mistaken, he feels something touch his cheeks, running like his own tears. “Stop,” he says again. “You’re hurting yourself—” The boy lapses into silence as he looks over his shoulder.

Voices reach to the shore. They are calling for Hux and Kylo – it sounds as if they are uncertain what they will find.

The boy stands over Hux and the water laps as his sodden clothes lift from the lake. He step away and, with a brief glance to Hux, leaves.

A ragged gasp shakes through Hux’s throat as he lifts his hands to his throat. By morning, there will be bruises and his voice will be a whisper. Hux hates his own weakness as sobs spill through his clenched teeth, but even more he hates Kylo for his recklessness. He hates the man and everything that he is and will be.

With slow, laboured movements, Hux pushes his arms under himself and turns over onto his knees. With his hands digging into the sand, he forces himself onto his feet. Not a moment later, Hux loses balance and falls into the water. It’s cold, but the burn of it has left Hux’s hands numb.

Giving into the pathetic indignity, Hux crawls onto dry ground when hands grasp his sodden coat and drags him up. When Hux wavers, he is held and pulled onwards. An arm wraps around his back and holds him as his unstable legs stumble to follow.

“Are you alright?”

Hux looks up, dizzy with the blur of dark, and crosses stares with Shirin.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” hushes Atli’s voice above Hux.

“Stop—I don’t need this,” he manages as he pushes away the hands around him and steps forward. But Shirin grabs him by the arm and drags him toward the camp like a stumbling foal, despite the grimaces Hux throws toward her.

The others are waiting by the fire, wrapped into their cloaks and watching with scrutinizing eyes. Kylo is not among them, but none seem troubled by this. Once they see Hux, they turn away their eyes as Atli and Shirin convince him to sit close to the fire.

The sodden coat that hangs around Hux like a heavy skin is peeled away and insults curl on Hux’s tongue as he pulls off his waterlogged boots with shivering hands – he can feel the stares on him, crawling on his skin like insects as whispers stir but don’t dare to confront him.

Hux is barely conscious when he is herded by Atli toward the spare bedroll set out among the cluttered satchels and saddle bags. He is pushed down and covered in blankets like a child that has the chill of winter and must be tucked away by its mother.

When voices return to conversation, hushed in Hux’s ears by the creaking of the fire, he hears footsteps whisper through the grass beside him. He doesn’t acknowledge the presence hanging over him and fixes his eyes on the crawling red glow on the burning coals.

“You know,” whispers Shirin between the meandering voices, “You can leave, if you want. You are not obliged to stay with us.”

It takes a while for Hux to work the sounds across his tongue and when he does they are barely heard. “There is no choice,” he tells her.

Shirin grimaces at him, but urges no further. Putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing, she stands and leaves Hux to the peace of his sleeps that swallows him like black water.

 

Fog drifts across the ground, turning the red of the pines into mellow tones and swallowing the distance in a milky film. Dawn is peeking into the forest as the sky crawls from its sleep, bruised purple by the pale clouds.

It’s the chill of the morning that pricks Hux awake – it creeps through the tight cocoon of blankets around him and brushes on his skin like trying fingers, easing a whimper out of him as he turns and grips the covers around him.

Moments beat by and Hux realises that the heat of the blankets has grown unbearable. Reluctantly, he unfurls from the binding fabric and kicks it down to his feet to let the chill breathe against his skin. With pain rolling through his skull like the beat of waves, Hux sits up and breathes through the ache until it recedes.

He opens his eyes and looks onto the pile of charcoal and ash in the centre of the drowsy camp. Hux turns and sees the others asleep, lost somewhere under the cover of the fog as the horses waver between the pines.

There is little use leaving someone on watch; these forest grounds are beyond reach of the roads and unless a hunter should pass, there is no threat for the company. So, they savour sleep and rest until the break of morning, besides Kylo who has been lost since the night.

Hux wraps around himself a single thick blanket that has been stitched from layered wool that droops to his knees as he stands. He hesitates for a moment before stepping forward as his legs tremble and sparks snaps in front of his eyes, chased by specks of soot. Blinking, Hux steadies and steps out of the circle of sleeping travellers.

Pine needles snap underneath Hux’s bare feet that shake in their uncertainty. He makes way through the fog, shivering as he walks between the burnished pines. Only the distant song birds seep through the milky air and Hux wanders alone with them.

As the thick moss and withered grass falls away, the reeds open around Hux on the edge of the lake where the water laps in the pale murk of the morning light. A shadow of the black spruce and pines on distant shore falls through the light, silhouettes of forgotten ghosts that drift above the fog curdled water. Above, the sun hangs on the waves of the lilac clouds like a belly swollen with gold, melting through the sky.

Sighing against the cold, Hux holds the blanket around his shoulders with numb hands and watches the fog drift low above the water. His hazed eyes do not see the ripple that passes through the lake some distance from the shore.

When it comes once more, it breaks as a surge against the water. Something blooms on the surface, at first as only a speck, a blot of black on the rippling water of white and lilac. But it grows, taking shape as water drips.

Blinking, Hux tries to focus on the thing in the lake that shifts as a dark stain in the froth. Running with opaline water, appear the contours of shoulders followed by the hollows of the back. Patterns are drawn by the sodden trails of black hair that has been pushed back from the stranger’s eyes.

Unassuming in the fog, the stranger turns, consumed by the water up to the line of their waist. Their skin is bone white and hair dark enough to be thought covered in soot. Blue stains of tattooed ash cross on white skin and drag Hux’s eyes down, urging him to stare at the soft lines that make him wonder if Freyr is playing a game with his mind.

Then, brown eyes look through the murk at Hux, sheltered by the arms of the helm of awe that have been stitched into the skin with ash beside the wearer’s left eyes. The stranger staggers and starts to tremble like a startled deer.

Hux can see how the man forces his arms down from being held across his vulnerable chest and squares his shoulder that won’t stop shivering. Distantly, he realises that it’s the same boy he saw on this shore. It’s Kylo, the damned creature that Hux thought to be faceless under the gnarled slate of his helm.

Hux’s bare feet drag through the sand as he steps back under Kylo’s uncertain stare. The water drips from the man’s hair, catching on his jaw as he trembles.

There is a sound reaching from the forest – a murmur of voices. Hux glances over his shoulder, peering into the fog. There is no movement between the pines – they are entirely alone.

Looking to the lake, Hux expects to find Kylo gone like a glimpse in the murk of a dream. But he is standing there amid the water, eyes trapped on Hux – waiting.

Uncertain of whether he wants to beat Kylo for what he had done, break his teeth from his skull and leave him to bleed into the water, or offer silent forgiveness, Hux grinds his jaw. Either is a ridiculous decision and all Hux can do it scowl and keep his mouth shut.

Holding the blanket around his shoulders with trembling hands, Hux turns and lumbers back toward the forest as the fog sinks around him. He keeps his eyes focused to the ground and the curved bumps of the roots, not aware as his mind plummets back to the water.

Hux halts and digs his feet into the dirt as he grimaces until blood comes through the cracks of his lips. He will not allow his own mind to fail him again.

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fek me breh. this chapter took much much longer to post than expected and i apologise. it will probably take me another month to post again as im kinda (very) busy and i also have other things that im working on that will be posted by halloween

They left the forest, taking a wavering path up along the side of the foothills. A brook, clear against the belly or rock, slips off the slopes between the yellow grass – fed by the tributaries hidden under the feet of the wanderers.

Water gulps through the cracks of Hux’s boots along the soles and he cringes with every footfall. He can feel the woollen bindings around his legs become sopping as he trudges on the unsteady ground of the mires, following the plodding ass of Atli’s horse.

The wind rose since morning, dispelling the fog that had crept down from over the mountains onto the forests. The grey had pulled over the sky as the company was rushed by the commotion of packing the camp before sweeping down the forest tracks to the edges of the fens.

Mud gathers on Hux’s feet when his pauses and pulls the droplet beaded cowl over his head. It had been tugged around him by Shirin and clipped on with a faceless brooch that keeps the rough grey fabric against Hux’s throat and scratches his skin raw. He watches from under the water jewelled hem as clouds catch on the mountain peaks and fray on the blue rock.

They will pass through the valleys, creeping along the mountain faces to make a path toward the swell of hills on the other side after missing the remaining chance to turn toward the marshland and skirting the mountain ridge.

The laughter of a raven shivers the winds and Hux squints at the gloom to follow the shadow of the bird against the grey. He yanks his boots from the sinking pits of mud and walks against the ascent of the hill toward the moving company.

Passing between the horses, Gunnær pushes straight the saddle bags and tightens the straps as the heft of the provisions slopes and shifts. Alva is feeding the beasts from her palm, sparing a handful of grain for each. The company has chosen to proceed on foot, trailing between the horses while Kylo takes the front, guiding his stallion through the mires.

Hux sidles toward marching Vikæll and Shirin as they pass along the day’s rations. Hux takes his share and chews in the respites of the mountain torrents.

“We should have turned east,” he tells them, biting into a husk of salted meat.

Vikæll grunts, but keeps walking as he braces against the wind with the weight of the bags he keeps on his shoulders. Hux smirks, realising that Vikæll is not spared from the struggle of the ascent.

“It’s not our choice,” mutters Ragni ahead of them – too far behind for Kylo to overhear.

“Yes, yes.” Hux nods. “The Æsir guide Kylo. I am aware; you have told me.”

Ragni drops her pace, pulling back the straggling wrappings of her mask as she marches beside the discussing party. “This is the road they have set him,” she tells Hux, “and it is the one that he must take to find his future.”

Hux looks at Ragni as she yanks the black cloth to cover her bone-white nose and mouth. “How does he know that he has found? Should I expect thunder and lightning? Or perhaps the mythic call of the Valkyries?” Hux smirks at the woman’s cringing scowl.

“I don’t know,” Ragni admits. “That is his challenge.”

“A cheated game.”

“Who ever said that the Gods are fair?” Ragni gives a sparse laugh. “That is why I think Odinn set the challenge. He is often blurred with Loþtr; they are blood brothers and hardly distinguishable – creating the beginning and the end.”

The winds hush them on the plateau of a heather moor at the foot of the mountains under a haze of clouds. The company trails through the withered grass and the bare, auburn heather that grows on the scrapes. Kylo dismounts as he walks on the bare rocks of the mountain foot, waving along those behind him. Hux watches the crawl from the safety of the flat mires.

When no one is left to hear but the skylarks in the torrents, Hux mutters to his own breath, “I am following a dead man.” He laughs.

Aching from the soles of his feet to the pit of his lungs, Hux follows the troop.

The ascent proves Hux’s fears; the rocks are running with the lashings of rain and the path is barely a strip of ground that forces the march to a slither. They are hardly moving, but Hux is still forced to pause to catch his burning breath. He looks from behind the shelter of stone onto the fens they have left behind as the grounds swells with rain and shifts like snake skin in the dark.

From here, Hux can see the green waves of the forests that crash on the shores of blue horizons. In between here and there, patches of murk glint where water lies in pools. Hux sees the northward road, curving on the edge of the mountains. Light flags between the folding clouds, searching for something somewhere out of reach.

“Hux—”

He turns, squinting as the winds stings his face. Overhead, birds are struggling against the currents, their voices taken by the howls. Beneath the arcing paths of their wings, Shirin is stood between the rocks of the crags, waving for Hux as the troop forces their way up.

The horses slip and waver behind their masters, their heads bowed as they follow the troop’s footsteps on the crumbling rock. Hux forces his eyes to his feet and the snapping scraps of heather around his ankles, beating his mind to not think that every sound is a slipping step.

The sun falls, but it is unnoticed when the clouds hold their grip on the mountains. The company can only walk and struggle in the wind that grows with the climb. Even when breathing burns and heartbeats shudder in their dry throats, when their stomach churn and feet bleed, they continue.

Finally, the path begins to turn toward a shallow valley between two peaks that are lost to the sky. It’s a relief, to take a full gulp of air and give some rest to the building aches.

Ahead, Hux hears groans passing down the chain of the marching troop. For most of the journey, Hux had clutched to the saddle bag of the plodding horse, urging himself into moving. Without a guide, he would not have kept to the tail of the company, losing their tracks come darkness.

Hux releases his cut fingers on the straps and smooths the lines of red when his feet slip on the rain smoothed rock. His hands disappear under currents of water as he grips on the side of the crag. His weak legs give out and pain cuts through his skull. Swallowing on his curses, Hux crawls toward shelter from the wind husked rocks and the waves of rain.

The storm breaks on the cliffs and rushes onto the crumbled stone under Hux’s feet as he scrambles for the cove between the two peaks. But his haste has cost him his footing and hunger twists the sharpness of his mind that would have given him the sense to keep pace.

Hux slips, struggles, fails and falls with the rush of scattering rock. His back is numbed with pain and cold. He doesn’t feel his head break on the stones or the lacerated gashes on his elbows and back. The ground shifts and Hux slips down the path, tumbling as he curls with fists braced before his face.

The air rushes from Hux’s chest as his back breaks on protruding rock. He rolls onto a step of flat ground and braces his hands forward, falling into black mud under a layer of coarse moss. The rain swallows his heaving.

The haze of grey underneath Hux is swaying and bursting with sparks. His chest blooms with pain as though the cage of his ribs has been wrenched inwards and cut into his lungs.

Steps disturb the rain and, like a nuisance dog, Hux is grabbed by the scruff of his hood and dragged through the gulping mud, scraping his knees on the rock.

“Move!” Hux hears Ragni call over the wind as he pulls him toward the receding silhouettes in the dark.

The rain cuts like hale and light is lost to the horizon, but they must keep moving. No matter how difficult the path becomes, they cannot stop or they will not live to meet the morning light.

Hux is shoved in between the company, should he be found dragging behind them once more. They all keep their heads bowed, keeping the worst of the rain from their faces. Consciousness feels a victory for Hux as all sensation blurs and numbs in the dark. He can only assume how Kylo keeps them on the safety of a path.

Stumbling, mindless, they walk through the night. They feet meander through currents of fast falling water that had been only dribbling brooks this dawn. Under the rainstorm, the rivulets gorge and gush, filling the boots of the travellers as they stumble down the mountain side.

When the grey rock begins to burrow under brown grass and the ground grows sluggish with rain, Hux knows he can march no more.

Slower and slower his feet drag until Hux is lost behind the travellers. He watches their backs slump and rise in the pitch of the night, hobbling and stumbling after their horses that are bowing under the weight of their own bones. Hux looks aside. Having walked through the night, Hux can see by the dark and trace the shadows of the pines and spruce on the line of the forest that had lied past the mountains.

They will pass through those woods, picking apart trails, avoiding signs of mankind should someone hinder this race against fate. The chase will continue, wild and mindless as Hux falls after the riders.

Deeply, he wishes he had swallowed his pride like a hot coal and married the whelp for the sake of remaining home. He wishes he had snuffed his curiosity and lied still while choking on his dignity.

The sludge of the bloated earth soaks through the cloth on Hux’s knees. There is not a part of him the rain hasn’t violated with its cold as he crouches, rocked by shivers.

Something kicks Hux on the thigh and he squints at the hunched silhouette of Gunnær. The traveller says nothing, just stares pointedly as water drips from their cowl.

“This is all insanity,” Hux says over the blows of the wind. His throat is raw. “You do know that?”

Gunnær says nothing. They turn their back on Hux and follow the slippery, beaten trail the company left behind. Hux watches them disappear behind the swells of the foothills where the grass shivers with the wind.

Heaving through the aches and wincing at the soaked clothing clinging to his back, Hux stands. He takes his first step forward and pain shudder from his skull to his back. He forces himself to move.

 

Light returns, taming the storm into a recess of the horizon behind the mountains, but the march finds no rest. The foothills shiver like a hide, scattered with rocks that had fallen from the slopes.

Waiting through the frozen waves of rain, the company watched Hux crawl through the distance between them. Kylo had been impatient to move and made his disinterest in stragglers known, but once Hux returned the journey continued halting and stumbling through the murk.

Hux shoulders his mind into clarity as the weather eases. He sees the company marching on the scraps of will as the day climbs into its height; they are all cold, soaked and empty. Had they been riding by the forest paths, they could have forced themselves to go on longer; they have ridden through for days without pause, at ease as the wind is on the heather scrapes.

Only Kylo moves without the weight of doubt or exhaustion. He marches, dragging his worn stallion by the reins on a path only he sees.

Every step the man takes swells Hux with contempt. He can feel Ragni’s stare dragging on his neck, daring him to challenge his guide. It is a test of his pride, but Hux is too delirious to resist biting the bone.

Letting go of Shirin’s horse to stand on the support of his own feet, Hux rushes down the hill. He opens his mouth to call out, but his head swims as if pulled by a current of water as nausea rocks through him and he bites his tongue. Hux collides with Vikæll as he steadies and slips down the grass, dragging the stares of the company.

“Kylo!” Hux shouts as he hauls himself toward the man. “We need rest; we can’t continue if we are as worn as the horses.”

With the ring of his mail shirt and the beat of his rain worn boots, Kylo walks. The empty eyes of his helm are fixed ahead under the shadow of his hood and Hux does not have the strength to meet his pace.

“Kylo!” Hux screams. His feet, weighed by mud, slip as he stops. Hux is beyond words or pride.

Finally, silence hushes over the fens. Empty eyes weigh on Hux through the milk of the fog.

“I will not sympathise with your delicate needs,” Kylo tells him. There is no life in his voice, no human expression. “We cannot stop here and wait for you to rest; this is exposed land, we must keep moving.”

There is truth in that, but Hux struggles to acknowledge the fear lodged in a numb part of his mind. All he wants, needs, is to crush that iron face nailed to Kylo’s skull that robs him of his humility and permits him to be a God among man.

“We need to move,” Kylo says without awareness of the urge nesting under Hux’s skin. The man turns and hunches as he continues on his path.

It takes the teeth embedded in Hux’s tongue not to scream like a child. Instead, he turns his back to Kylo and trudges against the ascent of the hill until he meets the foot of a fallen rock cascade and sits on a damp, moss covered stone.

Miserable and drawn to the last of his patience, Hux crosses his arms and presses his brow into his trembling knees. The weight of the road soaks into the body with the rain water. Everything smells of must and wet horses. Hux feels sore as if weeks of seafaring have passed over him in only a handful of days.

“Hux.” The grunted name is muffled by a veil of medallions. Hux hears them ring like laughter.

“Hux.”

“All I am asking for,” Hux mutters against his knees, “is for a moment—”

“ _Hux!_ ”

The sole of a heavy leather boot stabs his shin and Hux snaps from the cocoon of his drenched coat. He reaches for the blade across his back.

Before his hand can touch the pommel, Hux sees two shadows on the hill below them. Both are saddled on scrawny horses that canter through the fog by their master’s commands. They turn to avoid the still pools of rain water and Hux sees the shields strapped to the shoulders of the men.

Hux drops his head over his knees like a prey bird dropping onto its catch. The hood of his coat swallows his head from sight.

“What are you _doing_?” Kylo grabs for Hux’s shoulder and drags him, but the exhausted man only thumps down harder onto the rock. “We must go!”

Though Hux is crawling inside with fear, he can’t shove himself into movement when Jarl Ormarr’s men are approaching them from the foothills. He hears the hoofbeats. He felt death weigh on his neck the moment his eyes caught the colouring of the shields. The fragile hope of Hux’s survival lies in the open hands of a deluded _child_.

Hux hears Kylo step away as the worry of voices rising.

“Halt!”

Hooves snap through the grass and horses snort around Hux. He hears the riders pull into a pause, panting.

“You are not from here,” one considers, “are you?”

“No,” comes the reply from Gunnær. “We come from the Danir.”

The horses stumble and buckles trickle with laughter. Hux feels his breath burn against his cheeks and the wind catch on his coat, cooling the wet cloth.

“And what is your business?” asks a second voice.

“We are passing toward Uppsala, for the Winter Nights.”

There is faint laughter. Grass presses down beside Hux.

“Then you are certainly strangers if you decided the best path would be through the mountains!” Both riders laugh, sending the beads and medallions around their necks ringing. “You should have taken the forest path. It would have been the surest.”

“Thank you for the advice.” Gunnær’s gratefulness does not reach Hux. “But then why pass here yourselves?”

A rider grunts, solemn. “We ride with purpose. A fugitive ran from Fjallstad – a Jarldom standing in the south.”

Hux is numb and his senses are dull from the fear clouding him, making him too dumb to act.

“I can’t say… It’s familiar. But a fugitive? Is this person dangerous?” Something turns curious in Gunnær’s voice.

“Yes, a dangerous criminal. A murderer.”

“And a noble, in fact!” the rider’s companion laughs.

“Yes, that is correct.” A grim pause passes. “His name is Armitage— Or just _Hux_ , as he had often chosen. He is the son of Brendol – the Jarl of Fjallstad.”

They only keep him for his goods, these vagabonds, these strangers, these foreigners. They can have all the silver, gold and jewels if they wish for it – if only they say: ‘This man is him. This is the criminal you have been searching for.’ Hux will be hapless to stop them. He knows this and he only has to wait.

“That is terrible!” Mourns Ragni. “Who did he kill?” Her steps hush past Hux.

“Jarl Ormarr – the father of Hux’s bride to be. He was found dead under the roof of Jarl Brendol. All cut up, dead from bleeding out from his stomach. He had his breeches around his ankles.” There is laughter, stolen by the whistling winds that pass around the riders.

Grass whispers beside Hux, words pass, almost unnoticed, between the pausing travellers.

“Some heard,” mutters a messenger, “on the night of the death, Brendolson squealing like a pig in slaughter. They suspect the boy seduced the Jarl, led him on and proved himself a tease when Ormarr decided to take the boy for himself.”

“You mean to say Jarl Ormarr took advantage of Brendolson?” asks Ragni, her voice thin as if she means to seem afraid.

“Don’t be so gentle with your words; he is a malformed whelp. We saw how he clung to his mother’s sleeve at the feasting table.”

“It wasn’t unexpected for his rot to come through.”

The foreign riders murmur amongst each other behind the veils of their cloaks as hooves break against the earth, impatient to depart.

“If you see him, the pale redhaired wretch, be weary but do not be afraid. A reward will be given to anyone who offers his head to the sons of Jarl Ormarr.”

“He will be travelling on his own, most certainly on foot, taking the paths through the forest away from the roads.”

“We will remember your words,” Hux hears Kylo tell them, standing so much closer than Hux had assumed.

“And tend to your companion there,” a stranger says with a laugh in their voice. “He seems on the brink of death.”

The messengers cry their farewells and moments pass with the currents of the winds that flow over the foothills.

It seems to Hux as if the riders have carried away the company of foreigners too, until the hood of his coat is thrown back and the clumped hair on the crown of his head is grasped in a fist. Hux grunts as his head is hauled up.

Kylo’s hollow eyes stare over Hux as he is held by Ragni’s hand.

“Brendolson,” Kylo pronounces from behind his iron cast veil that glints under his cowl. “Who would have assumed that we have the son of a Jarl in our company.”

“Take your prize,” Hux tells him with a dry sneer. “It has no consequences to me; I am dead either by your hand or theirs.”

“Nothing to lose?” Kylo tilts his head like a curious dog. “No pride? No wealth? No cause?” He turns away. A faint scoff sounds. “A pathetic thing. As you would expect, when picking up a stray.”

Hux bares his teeth and spits up at Kylo. If he is a wild animal to them, he may act as one. Ragni yanks his scalp, but then her grip loosens as she speaks.

“Is it true then?” she asks, peering down over Hux.

“Did you provoke the Jarl?”

Hux startles and loses his grimace as he stares at Kylo’s dark back. “No—”

“Did you… Abuse the Jarl’s interest? Did you kill him for your purpose?”

“No—!”

“Did he violate you?”

Hux burns with anger as he watches the hollow sockets of Kylo’s eyes. He does not reply, holding his tongue in the cage of his teeth.

Kylo steps forward, leaning over the captured man like a crow on carrion. “Did you gut him before he could fuck you?”

“Yes,” Hux tells him.

Moments beat with the thunder claps of Hux’s heart.

Kylo’s reply is the storm’s respite. “Good,” he says and turns away.

Hux drops forward on the grass as Ragni releases her grip. He breathes hard as thoughts turn in circles inside his head.

The horses give nervous calls as they are pulled on by their masters down the hill’s slope toward the forest edge below.

“Well?”

Hux forces his eyes up toward Kylo. The man stands like an idol against the grey of the sky. “What?” he asks.

Kylo reaches out a hand, the thick leather of his glove in level with Hux – an offering held in peace. A swallow catches in Hux’s throat as he lifts his hand forward.

Then, Kylo’s voice beats through. “Are you not going to give your day’s payment?”

Hux stares, between the man and his hand – held in expectation. Blink after stuttered blink, Hux’s face becomes twisted by an ugly, red blotched grimace.

He bares his askew teeth from under his red, cracked lips as he stands and reaches back into the tattered satchel on his back, taking a handful of silver coins. Hux slips a piece into his right hand and hurls it at Kylo. The metal skips off the boiled armour on his chest and drops into the grass.

“Here—” Hux lobs a second coin. “—Is your—” A third jumps off Kylo’s helm. “—Payment!”

Gunnær plucks up the silver kufics from out of the grass as another silver disk is flung at Kylo who stands unfazed.

“Eat your silver!” Hux screams as he scrambles for more coins. “You tree-hanging vermin!”

Kylo crosses his arms as more silver fails to meet its target while Hux spits, stomps and yells obscenities.

“You filthy, milk-sucking ergi!” Hux continues, kicking the grass and slipping on the dew as he exhausts himself out of screaming. “May goats shit your mouth and Fafnir spit on your corpse, you inbred scum!”

Dumping the remaining silver on the ground, Hux spits and licks his lips, staring at Kylo as if to challenge him.

Defying the provocation, Kylo turns to Gunnær who is standing off the grass with a palmfuls of silver and asks, “Is that sufficient?”

Gunnær thumbs through the coins, counting under their breath before pocketing the prize and nodding.

Kylo glances to Hux and gestures for him to follow. “Come,” he says. “You might as well take a horse, if it keeps you from complaining.”

Laughter shakes between the cloaked figures as they turn to follow their master down the foothills, leaving Hux to gnaw on his lips as he holds the reins of Vikæll’s mare that have been shoved to him.

Swallowing on his rage, Hux climbs into the saddle and kicks the horse to trail after the company. The anger warms Hux, curdles under his skin and boils as he watches the trailing backs of the cloaked foreigners.

He hates them and he hates Kylo the most. Perhaps some part of him almost forgave him, when he saw the boy’s innocent face, but that stitch of sympathy was broken by the monster that comes with the etched helm.

Hux despises his arrogance and wishes he was reckless so that he might tear down the idol of Kylo’s presence and show that he is an ignorant, stumbling child.

 

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is such a slow burn i feel like we just watched the tectonic plates grow. anyywwhoo. i promise the final chapters will be very very fun
> 
> WARNING:
> 
> blood, so much blood, vomiting, injury, some gore (kinda) and death YAY! and typos bc MAN AM I TIRED

The stringed fishbones ring from the overhang of the farmstead’s roof. The crows have been coming through the evening to pick at the bundle of hares swinging from a nail beside the door of the hut. There is nothing for the birds to pluck besides the sparse, lumped fur on the bones.

Small boots clop on the steps of the farmstead and thump on the dusty ground before it. The girl’s hollowed eyes watch the group of foreigners sit about a fire between the pines before she turns and wanders to the rear of the hut. Hux follows her with his stare braced over the rim of his bowl as he waits for the broth to cool.

The company had entered the forest from the mountains by a crawling path and followed the withered trail on foot should they disturb the quiet of the autumn wood. As the sun fell in murk behind the clouds, they walked into the open plane of pastures, fenced by crumbling walls. There were no cattle grazing, no goats being milked or pigs fattening for winter.

The company marched until they came to the farmstead that hunched in the forest fringes in a shelter of pines. Atli came to the door of the hut and asked the family hiding within if there is anything to spare which they can sell. The wife went to turn him away, until she saw the meandering figures in the shadows and the fistful of silver.

Holding to her husband, the woman offered the strangers her broth and a bag of dried fruits and berries to go around. Giving thanks for the hospitality, the company kept distance as they hastened to make their camp. The mother and daughter brought food in turn were paid with cut silver which the woman hid in her skirts.

As the company eat and doze in the moments they can spare, they are watched from the shutters of the hut. Hux sees the flickers of shadows casted from the hearth as the family conspires behind the timber walls, gnashing and scowling to each other like dogs.

Hux is prodded in the cheek. He turns to Ragni with a gummed snarl.

“Eat,” she tells him, hiding her ink poked white hand under the torn edges of her coat. “This might be the only meal you will have for days.”

“I can’t eat when I know what _they_ are doing,” Hux hisses as he cradles close his food. “We shouldn’t have stayed.”

Ragni presses her eyes into slits and snorts into her bowl. “For once we do as you ask of us, and you still complain? We need rest, as you said.”

The vagabond’s reasons to shelter beside this farmstead despite the frailty of the peace are not at fault; the company savours what blink of rest they can steal as their shoulders sag and faces droop in their march. They hardly resemble the wild riders hunting through the forests as they slump under the frayed cloaks and bindings like dogs.

Even the tireless leader has not been saved from the curse of human faults; though it seems as if Kylo is in deep contemplation while he sits on a stump with his helmed chin resting on a fist, Hux knows, after passing too closely, that Kylo is snoring behind that mask.

Hux wishes he could take the same opinion on the matter and sleep for a moment. But his rest deprived mind whirls through skittish thoughts as he watches the farmstead. Perhaps the messengers they crossed on the hill side had followed them. It is not as though it’s difficult; there aren’t many people travelling so far from the main roads that pass through the bygds. They only have to ask.

Chain mail rings and metal thumps on the soft ground. With his lip on the cooling rim of the bowl, Hux observes Kylo rub sleep from his eyes and pull his torn cowl over his head. In the murk of the autumn evening, his skin seems inhuman – purple and blue under the droop of his hood. With the impish pout of his lips pressed against a gloved fist, Kylo stares down on the fire that licks his cheeks red.

Hux rears back words curdling on his tongue and forces his eyes to the farmstead.

Despite Hux’s doubts, the company remains the night. They keep watch through the darkest hours on the breach of the pastures and light no fires even as the frost creeps over the sodden cloaks and sleeping rolls that do nothing to keep away the cold.

Hux lost his sleep before dawn broke the sky. He remained sitting among the sleepers while Atli held his watch in the creeping fog. The birds in the tree peaks roused while the door of the farmstead opened and the mother let her daughter out, pressing a kiss to her head as she tightened the collar of her coat.

The girl went away, holding a satchel thrown over her shoulder, down the path away from the farmstead – northward of the mountains. Her mother stood in vigil at the door, watching the figures sleeping beneath the trees as the horses meander like shadows.

Picking the cold remains of the fire, Hux palms a husk of coal and throws it at the sprawl of Kylo’s body under the piled rags.

The vagabond moans like a disturbed bear and turns to Hux. Though it is dark and the fog spills like milk between the old pines, Hux knows that Kylo is boring him with a glare in his sleep haze.

“We should _leave_ ,” Hux whispers, tugging his borrowed cowl close. “Our peace is done.”

Kylo’s stare rises to the path from the farmstead. The girl’s face flickers like moonlight down the trail as he turns and runs.

They move like the spring melt, dragging from sleep as they saddle their mounts and seep into the fog of the early morning.

They ride without a word passing, urging the horses into a gallop as they trace the stretching lakes, turning eastward as the sun rises over the red pines and the fog eases. They rush through the fens, leaving the broken traces of their chase.

Hux watches the day escape him from his place against Shirin’s back, listening to the rhythm of the ringing medallions on the clothes of the riders. Ahead, as sunlight blink through the aspen canopy, Hux sees the blur of Kylo’s back and the white nape of his neck that is bare from his cowl and the chains of his helm. The iron beaten beads and bone rattle on his shirt and shiver with the light under the scraps of fur that hang away on his clothes by worn stitches.

The journey will soon end and Hux will leave this company behind. He will take a path, perhaps seeking passage westward while the riders continue on to Uppsala.

Perhaps, during the Winter Nights, as the Wild Hunt passes over the land, Kylo will give himself to the Gods. Or, as uncertain and entangled the future is, he will be visited by a dream that will lead him aside from the slaughter.

Hux is taken by the thought of Kylo being led to the place of his death, dressed in nothing but a shirt of white and skin cleaved of filth, flesh carved into a message for the Gods as his footsteps bleed.

Ahead, light cuts into the open canopy, red golden, startling the race. Kylo turns to the open mired and his flesh burns white between the etched blue lines. His eyes ignite with life.

They lose the breathless pace before the sun makes its full arc across the blood ripened sky and stumble into a clearing of birch sapling that have grown in a circle in the tightly woven tangles of the old pines and thorned undergrowth.

Hux clambers from Shirin’s horse. His knees shake and his feet sink into the flooded ground as he walks.

Saddle bags are thrown onto the moss and the horses are tied down for the night. There are muffled complaints addressed to the damp ground and grateful groans for the opportunity to sit on something that does not move or breathe.

The travellers buckle under wear of the ride, but Hux remains in a huddled by the edge of the saplings. From across the circle, he watches Kylo drop his coat among the saddle bags and stretch his arms over his head. Bones settle into place as Kylo’s face jars with strain, deforming the blue lines of his flesh.

“Hux,” says Ragni, her head pillowed on her cloak and cowl that are spread across the moss. “Rest, will you?”

She is ignored for the thoughts turning inside Hux’s mind as his stare follows Kylo’s path through the camp to pluck away the bow and quiver from Alva’s side. Hux’s teeth slip in his jaw like whetstones when Kylo passes, retreating from the breach of their circle.

“Is _he_ going to make yet _another_ offering?” Hux asks without the anticipation of an answer, raising his voice for Kylo to catch the tone of his impatience. “Another catch that could have been our food?”

“Is that your hunger speaking?” someone pries.

“Come and eat! I can see the bone on you from under that coat.”

Laughter follows Hux as he steps over the tied bundles thrown into the centre of the camp to the thickets of curled birches that hang coated with the last golden leaves. His step quickens as he disappears from the reach of the camp.

“Kylo!” Hux calls. He sees the dark back of the rider retreating in the trees. Light slips over the curve of the bow in his fist.

“Kylo—!” he shouts once more, stepping over the rotting stumps and ferns dripping water onto the ground. Brambles catch on Hux’s breeches and tear into the fabric as he struggles through the tangles and knots of the crowded forest.

Hux begins to gain on the hunter when Kylo pauses to set an arrow in the bow. The quiver is half-heartedly slung onto one shoulder and Kylo shrugs it straight when the strap begins to slip.

“Is the all-mighty hunter off to find another catch?” wheezes Hux as he battles through the leaning branches of blackberry brambles.

Kylo’s shoulders flinch toward his ears. He does not offer Hux even a glance as walks over the moss suffocated ground while his shoulders are lashed by the branches of the saplings.

“Shall I pray to Skadi? Or perhaps Bragi? Should I warn him to prepare for a skald—” Hux’s scolding breaks when he trips on the rotten arm of a storm felled tree that has been concealed by a shroud of auburn ferns.

“Rest your tongue, Hux,” mumbles Kylo from far ahead between the drooping fingers of the silver birches and aspen.

Hux rips his boots from a coil of thorns as Kylo’s shadow hushes through the low foliage, melting into the contours of the light. With curses curled on his lips, Hux throws himself forward to follow Kylo.

Birds titter from the swamped ground and clamber in the branches of the thickets, scampering from Hux’s heels as he marches on Kylo’s trail that he can no longer find in the rotting filth of the wood. He plunges his foot into the ground where he had thought he saw the print of a boot and crushes it with his sole. Halting, at last, Hux heaves the chilled air in gulps.

The hush of the forest settles over Hux and his reeling, wild mind. The branches creak, pine needles rasp far above with the passing wind. Shadows waver and light drips from the amber sky through darkness that makes it seem night has already crept over.

Hux turns from the crushed path between the ferns and steps into the murk of the spruce when his boots slip on the black mud. He squints to the ground under his feet to avoid an embarrassment and raises his boot to take a step forward— He halts.

Innocent and pristine, perfect like the ring of a cut tree, is a hoof print – pressed into the soft earth. It is undisturbed and fresh like the first spell of dew at dawn.

The company had not passed through here, Hux knows as much. They hadn’t circled in brief confusion before turning and guiding the horses around the grove of saplings. They hadn’t turned or led the horses toward the dark where no sound hides.

Hux trips on his feet and stumbles from the trail of hoof prints. He turns and runs into the brambles, shouting Kylo’s name.

Trailing over a brook that runs between mounded moss from a hillock, Kylo is watching the birds jump between the trees as he holds a notched arrow in the borrowed bow. He stalks like an animal and bears something feral in his eyes as Hux tears through the leaning undergrowth.

Rushing up through the stream with boots full of water, Hux shouts to Kylo, “We need to go! We need to leave immediately!”

Kylo’s shoulders slump and creases distort his face. “I have had enough of your commands,” he tells Hux. “Are you not satisfied that we left a safe place this dawn?” Kylo turns and continues up stream. The hindberry thorns snap on his shins and tug on his cuffs as he climbs the stair of rock.

“I am only trying to warn you,” insists Hux, following the man.

“There is nothing wrong. We are travelling as we should.”

“No, we are _not_ —!” Hux’s face turns red and purple with exertion as he climbs the slippery rocks of the brook, finding purchase with his hands on the moss coated stones.

Kylo looks over his shoulder at Hux and the storm of fury rising in his eyes. “Do not make me question your place among us,” he warns. “The only reason I keep you are the payments you give. You should thank me for not selling you for the gold.”

Kylo walks on, keeping a pace that forces Hux to struggle as they enter the hollow of a marsh in the cradle of the roots of old spruce.

Sinking through the moss that slurps around his feet, Hux reaches for the hunter’s shoulder to pull him back. “Kylo—”

Hux is flung aside by the suddenness of the bow being notched as Kylo turns on his heel, tearing the ground.

“I will not give you another warning. Touch me again and you will be the next animal whose throat I will cut.” The string of the bow creaks and the iron arrow head drifts through the air as though Hux’s shadow. Kylo’s eyes are tired and hollowed of pity – they do not hide the lie of his words.

Hux swallows and turns aside the iron point with his bare hand to spit, “Forget your damned ego for just _one moment_ and listen to me—”

Water gulps and the branches shiver. Footsteps. The threat uncoils from Kylo’s body as he loses focus and turns to the thickets.

He is too slow, or perhaps it was the wrong moment. Silver cuts before his eyes, snapping the bow and clipping his right hand. Blood scatters like ruby dust.

As shards of timber fall around him, Kylo stares at his maimed hand and the limp fingers hanging from their stumps by torn vessels and the frayed leather glove. He is too numb to step away when the blade arcs for the second time and drops toward him.

It only whispers past Kylo’s face as Hux flings him to the ground, uncaring of where he falls.

A second cut falls from the side, tearing across Hux’s back and cutting apart the seams of his coat. He stumbles, slips, but does not back away from standing against the danger.

There aren’t many soldiers – only a handful of men that must have travelled from the south along their trail. Hux looks to them with dumb wonder, trying to recognise a single face.

A dagger cuts Hux from his lamentation and forces him to move and grapple for his blade. He keeps the men at a distance with the point as they watch him for open weakness.

Their steel bites his sides, cutting away the cloth shields his wrung body. Hux retaliates, but exhaustion aches in his hands around the hilt and he fails to do little more than threaten with what shallow cuts he delivers.

The play of chance and a strike clarity allows Hux to swipe a deep cut across a man’s chest that buckles him and sends him away to the rear of the ranks. The brief victory bears as a heavy distraction when a blade meets Hux’s shoulder.

The metal lodges into the frayed muscle and tears when Hux breaks the dagger from the man’s hand. He does not see when a sword is swung behind him and brought down, pommel to the rear of his skull.

Hux bites on his tongue and his eyes bulge. His vision pulses with colour as he stumbles forward. He blindly swings the blade in his shaking fist as he feels the hot drops of blood bud on his scalp.

A second strike, to the base of Hux’s spine. He drops on his belly across the moss, somewhere beside Kylo who he cannot see. His blade falls from his slack hand as the sole of a boot drops onto his left calf. The heel rises and forces itself down once more, turning as Hux screams through the bone snapping.

Hux has nothing remaining in him as he reaches for the hilt of his blade – lying outthrown in the moss. But his hand is trapped under the press of a sole that cuts into his palm as cold metal sings against his throat.

There is a sharp, ugly gulp, as though someone is swallowing for air as they drown.

Hux turns his head against the ground as blood runs hot across his cheek. The sword on his neck drops away and shimmers in the air as it twists and falls beside Hux, bound to the wielder’s bodiless arm.

Blood, so dark it seems black on the blades of withered grass, drips by Hux’s eyes. He sees dragging boots approach him, gathering deep water around the mud crusted soles. He tries to shift, to crawl away, but the pain in his leg, the burrowing cuts and the heaving nausea keeps him pinned and still. Hux closes his eyes as a shadow swallows him.

Grabbed by his tattered coat, Hux is heaved onto his back. The pain, it makes soot dust dance in his eyes and his throat grip the breath escaping his chest. Blood prickles his face, dripping from the stumps of Kylo’s fingers as he reaches to grasp hold of Hux by the collar and hoist him up, heaving his limp body over a shoulder. Kylo’s feet slide in the torn moss as he lifts the man. His back buckles, but he walks.

Vomit fills Hux’s mouth as his lips rupture in wails with every shaking step Kylo heaves. Consciousness leaks from his mind and darkness bleeds into his eyes. He sobs and acrid spit runs down his face, seeping into his nose while his head hits Kylo’s back.

Around them, the spruce peaks shiver as a crow rises into the air, wrens chase through the brambles and pine cones shed their seeds onto the needle dusted ground. So serene – unconcerned.

Hux’s useless body rocks on Kylo’s shoulder as the tired vagabond looks back on the clearing between the trees. Blood of the dead is soaking through the moss into the swamp water that trickles down with the brook and across the rocks between his feet.

Kylo lifts his right hand to the light and looks through the gap of the maimed fingers where a lazy rush of blood runs over the frayed glove from the triplet tears to his bound wrist. The bones jostle in the ruptures and blood bubbles as the hand shifts, extending and bending the shortened digits from which hang husks of fingers with shattered nails.

Kylo brings his palm to his mouth and bites into the vessels that grip onto the dead flesh. He swallows down the pulsing blood in his mouth as he grinds his teeth into the meat and pulls. The vessels pop and a fresh bloom of blood runs across his chin and neck into the collar of his coat and mail shirt.

Water rushes in the tall grass as Kylo braces his grip on Hux, burrowing his bloodied stumps into the tears of his clothes to steady him. Low reaching branches of the birches snap across Kylo’s face and he runs with the decline of the ground. Even through leather and cloth, he feels blood burn against his back.

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: mentions of self harm right in the beginning, descriptions of injury and the recovery process 
> 
> glossary: 
> 
> Vé - it's actually an element within a noun that denotes a place as a sacred area (as in a shrine), but bc i didn't really feel like coming up with names for these shrines i just used vé as a term
> 
> Ginnungagap - primordial abyss in norse mythology
> 
> Goði - a jarl who combines their communal duties with religious duties
> 
> Wild Hunt - an event that falls on the days of the 'winter nights' during which odinn rides with his hunters across the sky and those who are not hiding or at home are usually taken away by the riders
> 
> Jibal - the ancient Islamic Empire
> 
> Atrak - Arabic for 'Turk'
> 
> (pls feel free to comment and ask if anything is unclear in the terminology)

The smell of burning hair and skin wakes Hux. He wonders if his mother had found a blade and severed the softness of her arms and the lines of her stomach again. The wounds must be burned closed. He hears lips spit pain and nothing of his mother’s voice.

Wondering when will a thrall enter the room to call for him, Hux opens his eyes. But he doesn’t see rugs or timber floors of the house. There is stone and an open doorway where bridled horses peer, their ears turning to the spitting fire. Hux wraps his hands into the coarse fabric that covers him.

Something drips onto the floor and a voice heaves on pain. Dead leaves hush against the feet of raised stones beside the open door of the timber hut. The trees creak outside, their branches snagging in the wind that rattles the thin roof.

This must be a vé, Hux thinks. A sacred place, a place of asylum.

Metal clacks on stone. Someone shouts, another argues. A touch on Hux’s bound legs and pain shivers through him, cutting consciousness from his skin.

His eyes open as he is lifted from the saddle bags bound to the back of a horse. Hux watches the night sky turn overhead to the heels of boots slurping in rain worn earth.

Hands hold Hux by his thighs and waist as he drifts to wake again to his bones grinding. The pain is distant, as though Hux is observing with those who are surrounding his body, pressing down on the exposed leg as the bones are forced together.

He tries to lift himself on his arms to look as the strangers work over him. A hand on his chest forces him down onto the bedding, keeping him still as shadows stretch on the rafters.

A hand adjusts the odd angle of Hux’s leg. Someone points, commanding, and hands brace the limb – all of different size and colouring. One is maimed, bound where fingers ought to be.

A scream ruptures Hux’s throat. Hands keep him to the floor as he shakes.

The world lapses.

Hux has no memory of passing into sleep or waking. He is sat against someone’s arm as water is offered to him from a bowl. He looks from its dark belly to the hands binding his bloodied leg.

Hux blinks and the water is gone. His tunic is lifted and wounds gasp like frowning wet lips. Their bleeding smiles are wiped and water runs onto the brown, caked covers. Hux sleeps.

Dreams are empty like the yawn of water in broken ice. They are the black turning pool of Ginnungagap that Hux tires of watching. So, he wakes to the snapping of fire tongues.

He breathes through his aches as he turns. The warmth is sickly as the drowsiness clings to Hux like the coarse blankets that have been bound around him. He looks through the length of the hall he does not know where looms stand by the far wall and women’s voices giggle and conspire. Hux thinks he sees Alva’s coiled hair and red stained coat, but in his eyes every shadow seems a face.

The doors of the hall open and a company of voices enters. Boots pound the floors and Hux strains against the light to watch a group of hunters arrive, carrying strung rabbits and grouse on their shoulders.

Without cloaks and their strange foreign masks, the company of fools seems too unfamiliar to Hux. Having known them by their voices and armour, he struggles to place names to their faces.

The vagabonds notice him and swarm like crows on carrion. Some crouch and touch him as if unsure if he is breathing as others call his name and grin with their cold stung faces in the dim firelight.

Hux tries to speak and ask them where they are, but the attempts tire him. So, he gives into being silent and still while the hunters bicker around him and paw with cold hands.

“—Hux.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Hux?”

“Is he awake again?”

He looks from the crumpled blankets and sees the doors by the looms haul apart. The girls are silent as they watch a small woman march and wave along a stranger in the stead of her pattering steps.

“Like a pack of dogs!” the woman shouts. Her small feet clatter up and her crinkled dark hands shove apart the huddling hunters as she crouches over Hux.

The small woman squints at Hux from under her drooping lids, pinching her thin lips together as he frowns from between the covers. They stare and scowl until Hux shrinks back against the bedding and his head drops on the unforgiving pillow.

“Maz, stop trying to frighten him.”

The woman turns in a swing of grey, bead laden braids and croaks a laugh. “ _Him_? Frightened?” She turns to the wounded and squints her hooded black eyes. “ _I_ should be frightened, a frail old woman such as I. _He_ is a murderer.”

Hands crowd on Hux when he tries to crawl out from under the blankets and escape the woman. She laughs as he is forced back and bundled like an unruly child by the rough hands of grinning hunters.

“You don’t have to run,” Hux is told by the man who stands behind the crone in the hall’s murk.

Hux wonders if the hag is playing games with his eyes when Kylo’s face forms in the dark. His stare searches for the perpetual rags, but finds the tall collar of a fine tunic with clean hems and breeches without patches worn through the knees. The boots stained with weeks of clay earth Hux recognises.

“See?” Kylo gestures to Hux. “You frightened the words out of him.”

“Then don’t you suppose I should frighten them back into him?”

Hux feels his hair being petted by meandering hands of the hunters while he watches Kylo argue with the hag.

“Maz is the goði of this Jarldom—” someone speaks through a breathless laugh against Hux’s ear. “Kylo begged her to allow you to stay—”

Ragni is struck with an open palm on the crown of her shorn head and she jumps aside with a shriek.

“Don’t tell the boy nonsense!” Maz hisses at the young woman and shuns her with the rest of the squabbling vagabonds who yap over their game like fox cubs.

“Pile of vermin,” Maz mutters and Kylo grins.

The woman kneels at Hux’s legs and peels the covers. He flinches from her, but Maz grabs hold of the left knee and drags it closer, even when Hux hisses through his teeth. With her shrunk, bulbous fingers, the goði unwraps the maimed leg and inspects it under Kylo’s attention.

“Will it have to be rebroken?” he asks.

“Not if he stops wriggling like a maggot underfoot,” Maz tells Kylo as she presses the splint back against the leg and binds it tightly. “Will you, boy?” she asks, glancing at Hux.

Swallowing on the thick clumps in his mouth, Hux stares.

Maz turns to Kylo and asks, “Did you cut out his tongue too?”

“No, but I can always check for damage.” Kylo leans down with an outstretched hand toward Hux’s jaw.

Hux flinches when he feels rough fingertips on his lips and drags himself from Kylo’s reach. “Don’t you dare touch me, you infant!” he spits, his words dripping so quick he slurs.

Maz is the first to laugh, almost tipping off her pointed knees. Kylo’s grin is bearing onto cruel and Hux would break his leg again just to kick him.

 

 

The dogs sit with the hunters in the evening as the catch is skinned. They lick their gums and watch the fur coats peel like the skin of ripe fruit, revealing the red sinews. The hounds whine and the hunters laugh, holding the catch over the heads of the beasts that know better to remain at the heels of the masters.

Hux swallows his third bowl of broth from the pot that hangs over the fire. Nobody has allowed him to leave the hall where servants and families of the house pass, free to see the harboured murderer under their roof. But they do not care for him – Hux or the vagabonds living like wild animals in the hall.

Hux pulls the coarse blanket over his head and drops the bowl beside the firepit. As he sits in the cloak of mottled fabric, his broken leg remains throw out in a maimed stretch. Hux knows that he can’t keep with the wild chase even if the sons of Jarl Ormarr arrive at the doors this very eve.

So, accepting his uncertain asylum, Hux waits and stews in his unconcealed contempt.

The company of Kylo Ren sleeps and eats within the hall, crowded with the Jarl’s kinsmen under the single roof. Every evening, they sit about the benches and talk, mending their clothes or cleaning the rain sore riding harnesses. They all come to sit with the kinsmen – besides their chieftain, of course, who departs to his own rooms. Some talk of journeys, reminiscing voyages together, others of their homes in the west. No one talks of the days that will follow.

In the mornings, the company wakes with the sun and leaves the hall. They are absent until nightfall and return with boots curdled in mud and hands filled with catch. Absent words will pass through the ashen air of the hall to Hux while he sits and watches women and children work at the looms in the far corners of the hall where Alva has taken a taste to preening like a crow in front of the maids.

They eat. They sleep. Sometimes, people gather by the vagabonds, anticipating to hear of the ventures to the borders of Jibal and the enslaving of the Rus. At times, Kylo departs the enclosure of his room and comes to listen, resting his impish chin on his hand that he forgets is less than it was before – embarrassing himself when he misses his fist.

Sometimes, Kylo will choose to take a seat beside Hux where he hides in bundles of weaved quilts. They will hunch like an incomplete pair, with their cuts and bruises, maimed limbs and tired eyes while they listen and try not to sleep.

When the people leave and the company of fools amuse their skittish attentions with games, Hux and Kylo frown into their emptying wine cups.

“Shall I keep waiting for the overdue apology?” Hux asks one night, when his skin burns with the drinks he has sipped.

Kylo stares at him with his boyish eyes and curls his lip in such a way that Hux’s hand aches to wrap around his throat and squeeze.

“For what?” Kylo asks.

Hux reaches out from the blankets and takes Kylo’s right hand that is clenched in a fist of dirty unspooling bandages.

“I don’t suppose you are missing these?” Hux jibes and trembles with laughter when Kylo rips free his hand to bind it in his sleeve.

“Your ego cost me a good leg,” Hux tells him through a smirk that slips too wide from the wine. “And that seems to be costing you time.”

Kylo glances, his face twisting in a frown. “We aren’t waiting for you,” he insists.

Hux sips on his drink that is spilling from the sides of his mouth. “It doesn’t appear as if you are intending to continue your journey any time soon. Winter Nights are approaching, and yet you are here, warming your feet by the fire when they will be so so cold very soon when you are hanging from a tree beside the hof.”

Kylo turns from Hux with wide eyes.

“I wonder, I wonder…” Hux sighs. “I wonder why. Could Odinn’s chosen fool be afraid of dying?” He drinks the cup dry and reaches for the pitcher.

“And all the while, here you drink,” Kylo mutters into his folded arms, watching the red coals pop and spit. “You drink as if you can hide here under the asylum of the goði. The Wild Hunt will take you, Brendolson.”

Hux laughs at the name and groans, pitching forward when his leg hits against the edge of the firepit. “Didn’t I say that death is inevitable on that day you cursed me with our meeting?” he slurs, wincing as his scab crusted back catches on the thick wool of his clothes. “We are both dead men, Kylo Ren.”

They part. Kylo goes to the vé to listen to the gods and leaves Hux to his drink that blooms on his cheeks like a kiss of frost.

From then on, they sit apart while the company speaks of the heroics of the gods with the people of the hall. They recall the feats of wit, strength and the wonders of the world before mankind took their first steps. All listen, struck with awe.

That night, Hux sleeps and in his mind sees the grindstone of Fenja and Menja split on the ground, crumbling into the rocks that fall on the mountainside under rain and thunder. He thinks it’s the wind shaking him when he wakes, but he is still in the dark of the hall.

Hux turns onto his back as he continues to be rocked by the disturbance. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he shoves it aside.

“Are you awake?”

Hux blinks and gathers the wisps of the dark into Kylo’s silhouette. “No, I’m dead asleep,” he mumbles and pulls the covers to his chin, but then peers up again and asks, “Are you leaving?”

Kylo shakes his head.

Hux glances at the doors that stand undisturbed. “An ambush?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Kylo says nothing for a long while and Hux decides to turn over and sleep when he hears, “I am not willing to remain in the same house as you unless you bathe.”

Hux sits up, forgoing all the pains and aches he has been harbouring. “I will _not_ let one of the thralls near me so that they can laugh about my inadequacies.”

“I thought, as a Jarl’s son, you will be used to it.”

“I could ask the same of you; I’m sure you would like the bandages on your hand to actually hold.”

There is a scoff. “Get up, Hux.”

“Why?”

“You _reek._ ”

Without a choice, Hux shoves aside the covers and crawls from the bedroll. He attempts to push his good leg under himself to stand, but the pains spasm and Hux heaves until they recede into a numbness that permits him to move.

“Let me help you.”

Hux flinches when he is taken by the elbows and pulled to his feet. He almost drops forward when the support is gone and easing his weight onto the injured leg makes him blanch.

Kylo grabs Hux’s arm on the maimed side and brings it over his shoulders.

“Careful, Brendolson.” Kylo’s laugh skitters beside Hux’s ear. “You don’t want to show your weakness, do you?”

With a scowl, Hux snaps his hand over Kylo’s ear. He is surprised when he is not dropped onto the floor at the same instance.

Step after step, they hobble through the hall around the bodies of the sleepers to the rooms of the longhouse. Hux loses his attention on the direction of their march as he strains not to trip over his bare, numb feet and keep a hand twisted on the sleeve of Kylo’s shirt.

A door opens under Kylo’s palm and Hux is gripped in the light of a burning hearth. It is feverish inside the room, nauseating, but Hux finds relief in the chill of the floor. Kylo closes the door behind them.

There is a scattered bed and clothes thrown on furniture, plates and empty cups arranged on the floor and saddle bags are heaped in a corner. There is a bath of nailed timber by the fire, larger than what Hux would find reasonable.

“Well, go on then,” Hux tells Kylo, dragging his arms off his shoulder. “Leave.”

The man just leers and holds Hux’s wrist tighter. “If you can’t stand on your own, how do you except you will climb into the water?”

As Hux grapples for an excuse, he is urged toward the bath. Helplessly, he gives up his warm tunics and finally undoes the belt of his thick, winter breeches. He stands, gaunt and ashen, while hands remove the woad pasted bindings on his ribs and spine.

Hux stares and shakes like a feral dog that has been given food from an open hand as he is helped into the water. He wants to twist his arm from Kylo’s fingers and tell him to go and weep at his own wounds but, as his feet slip on the belly of the bath, Hux swallows past his pride.

The water scolds as it closes over Hux and he wonders how long the thralls laboured to fill the absurd tub. He leans against the rim and lifts the injured leg onto the opposing edge so that it might be left undisturbed. The sopping bandages and split are removed by Kylo’s hands and Hux admires the ruptures in his calf where the bone had made itself known.

“Is the apology accepted?”

Tempted by sleep in the heat of the water, Hux turns his lazy eyes to Kylo who is kneeling beside the tub. He grins, pleased by the outcome of his position, and shrugs.

Hux is drunk on the heat and the darkness of the water that he flicks toward kylo and says, “You ought to scrub my feet clean, wash my back and admit that you are an insane fool. Then, I will consider.”

A smile comes and goes like a waver of light as Kylo leans forward on his knees and pushes up the sleeves of his tunic to the elbow. He reaches down into the water to bring Hux’s other leg to the side of the bath.

Words turn uselessly on Hux’s tongue as he watches Kylo take a linen cloth and soak it, taking it to near-black soles of Hux’s feet. He scrubs without malice in his gestures and keeps his hands gentle on the bramble marked ankles.

Hux shoves Kylo’s shoulder with a foot, just to provoke, but the vagabond does not lash or curse. He only shrugs aside the heel digging into the hollow of his shoulder and he asks for Hux’s arms with a grudging glance. He scrubs the scabs of blood and soil lodged into Hux’s cuts and holds his hand without crushing the bone.

Hux feels the calloused skin that had grown thickly around Kylo’s knuckles as he works, embedded with dirt and leather dye. He watches the tattoo blued fingers run between his, turning them with amiable patience.

“You are so pleasant when you are docile,” Hux says as his palms are diligently washed. “Maybe you should be kept this way.”

Kylo looks aside from his work, letting the pale hand in his hold slip away.

“Obedient,” Hux whispers, reaching for Kylo’s throat. “Like a dog.”

Kylo does not flinch when a hand closes on his neck. He stares down on Hux’s grin as the fingers squeeze, pressing onto his jugular.

“What do you think, Kylo? Should I put a collar on you?”

Kylo raises his chin and places his injured hand on the wrist at his throat. “Is that what you want?” he asks.

“What do _you_ think?”

Neither speak. They watch each other like winter-starved animals, restraining their bare toothed grimaces as their bodies tense under the pressure to strike.

The hand collaring Kylo’s throat cinches like the grip of a snake’s bite when he pushes against it and a kiss is struck onto Hux’s lips. His body twitches and tenses, aggravated by the man above him. Hux is the first to bite, to strike and scratch under Kylo’s ear as a snarl is kissed into his mouth and water thrashes as if it’s boiling.

Hux pushes Kylo aside, throwing him back toward the floor, and leans against the side of the bath with his hunched shoulders braced. They are both red-faced from the heat of the water, coiled with dread that stains their mouths. Kylo is breathing with a hard stutter and Hux sees the flush on his chest above the gaping collar of his shirt.

Water spills onto the floor as Kylo climbs over the width of the tub and drags Hux forward by his shoulder and neck. They kiss and cling, leaving scores of marks on each other’s skin like they are searching for unspoiled blood. Hux drags Kylo by the hair and snarls against his throat, scratching the warm skin with his teeth.

The violence and the hate simmers above the water, leaving them heaving, struggling to breathe through the thick air. They are exhausted and their movements are slowing. The snarling, spitting strikes of lips begin to slow to kisses and instead of leaving tracks of blood their hands only hold.

Kylo drops his cheek against Hux’s temple, arms wrapped around the steam flushed shoulders. Hands senselessly trace the stitched seams across Kylo’s back, returning to his neck where the damp hair is curled around rough fingers.

“Well, at least now you can’t deny you are an insane fool,” Hux mutters against Kylo’s ear.

“No such words will ever leave my mouth.”

Hux sneers and grips Kylo’s shoulders, abandoning the water on his shaking legs. Despite it all, he stumbles out, dripping water onto the floor and Kylo who stands and holds him by the elbows. Hux’s steps corner him through the room to the unfolded covers of the bed.

“If we are both dead as we can be,” Hux says, taking hold of the buckle of Kylo’s belt that holds closed the grey fabrics of his shirt. “Then we may as well enjoy the time we have.”

As naked as his first day under the sun, Hux holds Kylo with his stare like a dog on a leash. The belt drops to the floor and Hux takes the hem of Kylo’s tunic, pulling it up as Kylo obediently raises his arms.

Blue lines of ash embedded under the skin crawl over Kylo’s arms and shoulders, charting away for Hux to follow as he reveals new territories for his palms to admire. As before, Hux expected scars, old crevices of war-wounds. But under the godly praises cut into Kylo’s body, he is bare. So untouched and innocent he flinches when breath hushes on his bare chest.

Hux smiles at his skittishness and tilts up Kylo’s head with the flick of a finger on his chin. “Afraid?”

A sound curls Kylo’s lip and Hux leans across, teasing him into kissing with drunk carelessness. He laughs when he feels hands on his ribs, holding as though bracing an animal from running free.

Hux shoves Kylo toward the bed, aching to relieve his reliance on the maimed leg.

“Am I doing well in my apology?” Kylo mumbles with his kiss slack lips. “I can’t say I have ever been sorry for anything.”

Hux grasps Kylo’s hands away from his waist. “Is Yggr’s mighty fool asking for guidance?”

Kylo doesn’t catch onto the jeer and his boyish eyes follow Hux like two curious hounds as he softly says, “Please.”

It is so easy to see his youth, like this when his control is given to Hux’s hands. His nerves are riling him and Hux feels the tremors when his brings his hands to the soft curves of Kylo’s hips. He grins at the tentativeness that follows the violence of their spat.

“I would offer my hand,” mutters Kylo as he dares to pull against Hux’s grip. “If you would like.”

Hux bites on his tongue when he feels the heat of Kylo’s palm against his hollowed stomach, the cracked nails digging into the cold lashed skin. Hux yanks Kylo by the welcoming width of his hips and kisses him, lifting Kylo’s chin so that his sweet, boyish face doesn’t hide from him.

Hux pries at the red lips between the kisses, pressing his thumb between the chipped teeth and scoring across the tongue with his nail. Kylo latches his lips around Hux’s fingers, scraping his teeth on the knuckles as he finally takes Hux’s cock into his hand and wraps his rough palm around the burning skin. Hux flinches forward, struck between wanting to see Kylo choke on his fingers and fucking the warm, tight fist.

Hux shoves his thumb between Kylo’s lips as drools runs thick down his chin and pulls on the side of his mouth before pinching the thick bottom lip. Kylo moans and tears catch in his eyes when Hux digs his nail into the pink inside. Through the delirious pain, Kylo tightens his grip on Hux’s cock and caresses it to watch his face grow flushed in the firelight.

Forgoing himself, Hux takes Kylo’s face into his hands and kisses him while his hips thrust with the strokes of his hand. When the insistence in Kylo’s grasp becomes feverish, Hux twists his hair and snarls.

“How about I now take your mouth?” he spits, putting his fingers between Kylo’s lips and thrusting them deep, watching his soft eyes water. “To your knees.”

Kylo crumples on the floor. The sounds twists Hux’s face in a wince, but Kylo ignores the pain for the sake of clutching onto Hux’s thighs and bringing his face against his stomach – to kiss and lick like a demanding pet.

Hux drags his fingertips across Kylo’s scalp, pulling his ears and the roots of his hair. Kylo kisses the curve of Hux’s hip, bringing his mouth down to his cock as he glances up.

“Go on,” Hux whispers, pulling Kylo in by his hair.

With close eyes, Kylo opens his mouth and catches his red tongue underneath the head of Hux’s cock. He sinks his wet lips around the girth with the guidance of Hux’s strained white hands that are on Kylo’s jaw, feeling the taut skin as he forces his mouth down.

Hux wants to rut into the warmth of Kylo’s mouth, to take until he has fucked every silver of anger out of his body. He feels like an animal when he relishes in the pain on Kylo’s face, urging him to take and take.

Even though it hurts Hux to deny himself, he forces his hands to remain gentle when Kylo diligently eases his lips over Hux’s cock, swallowing without complaint. Hux sighs when he feels the rough tongue lavish him, taking more than Kylo is able as he chokes on spit and snorts through the cock faltering his breathing.

In the fog of his mind, Hux wonders vaguely how can he make this man, a rider of Yggr himself, kneel in front of him and take his cock like an obedient girl searching for favours. He wonders what he had done to gain the adoration in those boyish eyes. Kylo relishes in his place on his knees, grasping for Hux.

Though the aches are beginning to gain on him, Hux widens the stance of his feet and thrusts against the resistance of Kylo’s throat. Saliva splatters on the floor in an echo the hoarse whimper as hot tears flood his eyes.

Hux twists the dark, sweat strung hair of Kylo’s head around his hand and forces him down as far as his throat will allow. Kylo chokes and Hux keeps him there until his hands are shaking and teeth are crushed together inside his jaw.

Kylo pulls away and drops of white spittle drip from his swollen lips down his chin. His eyes are rimmed red and cheeks splotched with rushing blood.

Hux holds himself by Kylo’s shoulders, heaving as sweat runs off his skin. Hands strokes down his sides while rasping breath fills his ears – harder and deeper than his own.

Swallowing through thick spit, Hux lifts his right foot and presses it down against Kylo’s groin. He feels the hard, warm weight of his cock through the linen and wool as Kylo’s hips lurch and falter under the pressure of his sole. Hux sees a twist of fear in Kylo’s face each time the heel of his foot presses into the base of his cock, pushing inwards, but he never moves to stop Hux.

“Do you think I should give you relief?” whispers Hux as he grinds his heel into the thickness. “Or is this prize for myself alone?”

Kylo’s bleary eyes follow the cruel movements. “Do as you like,” he responds, voice hitching.

The game of control is lost when Hux takes a step away from Kylo and whimpers under the pain. Without responding to Kylo’s voiced concern, he walks away to drop onto the strewn bed and push up against the pillows, holding a hiss between his teeth.

“Come here,” Hux tells Kylo who is looking to him from the floor.

He climbs from his knees, shaking off his boots and breeches to stumble onto the bed where he crawls over the cover toward Hux. His head hangs between his shoulders and back arches under Hux’s hand as he braces over him like the heavy shadow of dawn. Hux is ought to feel afraid of Kylo, cornered and trapped, but he can only smile and stare until the blue lines scrawled across Kylo’s full chest darken with his flush.

Hux pushes back the damp hair from Kylo’s neck and pulls the frightened man down. Kylo’s arms buckle and their teeth crack together as they collapse into a kiss. Hux tastes blood from his lip where Kylo’s teeth cut him, but the sting is licked away as Hux pulls his arms around Kylo’s waist.

Even knowing that, if he wished, Kylo could outmatch him in almost every way in this moment, Hux feels delirious with power. He has reduced Kylo to an animal rutting against his lifted thigh as foul spit drips from his red lips. It feels like victory. Hux pulls Kylo’s face against his neck, forcing him closer as he fucks through his fever, moaning at the feeling of Hux’s skin against his heavy cock – barely touching.

Kylo becomes frantic, gasping empty nonsense through his rutting, as Hux holds a hand on his neck and marks his bowed back red. He can hear Kylo sob, ugly and muffled against his shoulder, and tears run hot as though the sweat on his skin.

The delirium ends when Kylo cries like a gutted animal and shivers, his hands clasped like brands over Hux’s chest. The filth of cum pours down Hux’s thigh as Kylo heaves and sniffles, buckling under the weight of his own bones as his mind leaves him.

Hux pushes Kylo aside and he falls on the rucked waves of the covers, stinking of sweat and rancid spit. Hux stares to the rafters of the ceiling while Kylo gulps the air of the stifled room. Now, he can hear how heavy their breathing had grown, like a shuddering sail in a torrent.

They lie still, as if afraid that once they move the weight of the moment will collapse and smother them both. Hux cringes when Kylo lifts himself from the bed and almost begs him to stop moving should he break the respite of peace.

Kylo walks to the bath and bows down to cup water in his hands. Droplets splatter on the floor through the gap of missing fingers as Kylo presses the water to his face and scrapes back his hair.

“That is filthy.”

Kylo turns and opens his mouth as if to ask a question – too lost in his own mind to be coherent yet. Hux can see it by his eyes that are too pretty when filled with the burn of tears.

“I bathed in that water,” Hux explains.

Kylo swallows and picks up the linen rag abandoned on the rim of the tub. He thumbs at it before drawing the fabric through the water. “And I had your cock in my mouth,” he mutters, voice rough.

“Don’t compare my cock to dirty water.”

Lying against the pillows in his silence, Hux watches the water drip over Kylo’s back as he wipes away the sweat from his skin. He notices the marks that decorate Kylo from his feet to his head, speckled like the spray of mud and the groves of childhood scars under the blue arches of tattoos. There are scores of scabs that have cracked and began to bleed – signs of Kylo’s egotism that Hux does not pity.

He watches the sodden linen slip from Kylo’s grip when he forgets himself and rediscovers his injury like an absent-minded child.

Hux scoffs when it happens again, after Kylo attempts to force order onto his hair with a leather cord. “You _are_ permitted to ask for help,” Hux suggests.

Kylo is schooled into sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed as Hux keeps him in place with his legs restraining his shoulders. Even then, he twitches and jerks with every pass of fingers across his scalp.

Braids and such frivolities are useless pieces of decoration if they are not intended to keep lice from breeding on the scalp. In any case, it is much easier to take a knife to the infested hair. Hux considers the time to weave silver threads and beads into braids a luxury – an entirely useless luxury that is often sought after by children.

With the pleasure of a sore body still making his reason mellow, Hux indulges Kylo for the moment. He weaves the mangled locks together into a semblance of braids that run along the sides of his scalp, tied away with the withered strips of leather that Kylo hands him. It is a shock to be able to see Kylo’s eyes clearly when he turns and looks to Hux without peering through heaped hair.

“Give me your hand,” Hux says as he pulls Kylo in with the heels of his feet on his chest.

When Kylo is too slow, Hux grasps the wrist of his right hand and lifts it. The stains of old blood have spread on the soaked bandages and the colour deepens as Hux pulls apart the cloth.

With the thumb and forefinger intact, there is only half of the middle one and the second to last. Kylo’s smallest finger is cut to the knuckle which twitches under Hux’s thumb as he nudges the frayed skin. The flesh has been sealed shut with fire in time and the wounds remain safe of festering infections should more be eaten away.

“This looks beyond painful,” Hux mutters, disposing of the filthy bandage.

“I don’t notice.” Kylo pull his hand from Hux’s touch and picks pieces of thread from the crusted scabs.

“The Æsir must be truly playing with your mind not to feel that.” Hux pushes his good knee against Kylo’s jaw and feels him flick it in turn.

The fire has become smothered with coals in the hearth, but neither Hux nor Kylo are willing to stand.

“We are leaving within two days,” Kylo says after the silence during which his head had tipped and his cheek fell against Hux’s knee.

“I can give you no promise about my condition, but I will prepare,” Hux tells him.

Kylo lapses once again. His fingertips are on the ankle of Hux’s foot, winding in circles that Hux barely notices.

Thinking the conversation is done, Hux moves to pull apart the covers when hears the frail whisper.

“You could stay.”

Hux laughs and pulls Kylo by the hair. “Why would I do that?”

Kylo shrugs, shifting Hux’s legs against his neck. “Maz is willing to shelter you until winter passes. Despite what she might say to you.”

“Why would she offer me asylum?”

“You know me and my unfortunate blood leads to my father who is an old friend to Maz.”

“So…” Hux considers. “I overwinter. Then what?”

“You can cross the Baltic to the Rus, then travel with their merchants to Jibal when they trade in summer. You can stay in the east, see where it takes you.”

It is plausible and not completely unreasonable. Hux could leave for the Slav hinterlands where it is certain he will not be met by the Svíar. He could become a merchant, he could trade his knowledge in the east to the Atrak. He is certain that him and his mistakes will be unknown there.

“No,” Hux declares as he mock-braids the hair at the base of Kylo’s neck. “I refuse.”

“Then, what do you plan?”

“I started this journey with you, I may as well end it that way.”

 

The coals lie cold in the hearth and the wind sings against the roof. Frost has sealed the shutters, but Kylo still leaves for the vé after clothing himself in the thick riding woollens. He tried to kiss Hux before going into the dark, but he was pushed away and nothing was said again of their paths.

Kylo left through the door like a shadow, large but absent. Hux watched him from the light, safe in the haze of the bed.

Having tied a splint to his leg, Hux redresses and sets the fire to burn through the night. Under the collapsed mound of saddle bags, he finds his satchel. It’s clear that it has been ravaged by hands that could not have been his. Yet nothing has been taken except for the filth that stained his travel clothes. Perhaps, the seeking hands had found no value in what Hux has of his reverses and took pity.

Hux unfolds two thinly worn shirts from the satchel, set to rip them into bandages. As he lifts out the fabric, he hears a thump on the covers of the bed.

 

 

Behind the shutters, the wind rises with the threat of winter on its tongue as it sings in the hinges of the doors. In the stables, the horses are breathing through fear as the cold touches them, rearing them into a quivering canter.

When Kylo returns with the smell of the frost and blood on the cuffs of his coat, the hearth is burning anew. He drops his cowl, coat and outer shirt onto the dark pool of the floor, stepping onto the toes of his boots to pry them off.

Trembling through the sting of winter, Kylo stumbles to the bed where Hux has been sleeping with the covers drawn to his ears. He whimpers when the mattress rocks under a twin weight.

“Forgot the way to your own bed?” Kylo mutters, hiding nothing of his laughter.

Hux snorts into the pillows and does not move. “Repaid the Æsir for their guidance?”

The covers tug and lift, allowing a breath of cool air inside. Hux winces. A blow of warmth hushes on his face when Kylo settles.

“I hope.”

Hux yawns and reaches down to pull Kylo’s legs over his hip – still filled with gracious patience. “Freyr will curse you for taking away the warmth from my bed.”

Kylo laughs and grips Hux with his calves, trapping him against the lumped mattress. “His retaliation will be great.”

“Make me forgive you.”

Lips press sweetly to Hux’s nose and he blanches away before they can reach his brow. But Kylo smacks his mouth to the line of Hux’s red hair. Palms shove against Kylo’s face as he puts his mouth against the base of Hux’s neck and drags his open lips up, meeting the hair roughened line of his jaw. There, Kylo licks like a begging dog until he hears Hux laughing.

“Have I done enough?” Kylo asks after indulging another kiss.

Hux opens his eyes at last and pushes himself from the mattress. Kylo watches him as the covers are thrown aside and Hux reaches for the satchel hanging from the bed post.

“What are you doing?” Kylo sighs through the covers.

Like the moon’s pale face, a brooch gleams from Hux’s hand in the firelight. He presses his thumb to the amber sphere as the wolves circle in their own eternal cycle that has been caught in the burnished metal.

Kylo lies on the bed with his arms under the pillows, waiting for Hux to turn toward him. When the palm of bronze is offered to him, Kylo recoils, climbing onto his knees to push away from Hux.

“I don’t want your payment,” Kylo spits, throwing aside the brooch from the hand with a careless swat when it is urged toward him.

Scoffing, Hux takes up the pin from the covers. “It isn’t a payment. I have nothing left to bargain with. This is a parting gift.”

The scowl drips from Kylo’s mouth when Hux offers the brooch once more. He receives it with opens palms, but does not anticipate the weight that forces him to bow though the slip of bronze bears on him no more than a coin. It drags Kylo down as though Hux had poured an ocean into the cradle of his palms that he is fighting to not spill.

Hux watches Kylo’s fingers close over the amber and bronze, hiding it from the light. “Take it,” he says, “to your Gods if that is where you wish to be.”

Kylo’s cold face splits in a grin and laughter shivers through him as he bows over his clutched hands, the crown of his head touching Hux’s chest. There, he stills, shaking as something passes through him that isn’t the relief of laughter.

 

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooooooooohhhhh boy im so sorry about how long this took to update. but unfortunately i have to prioritise other things over writing fic. eh w/e. UNFORTUNATELY it will take even longer to post the next (and final) chapter as it's completely unwritten and atm i have a lot of school work. please be patient with me. this fic takes a fuck load of energy to get written and there is only so much alcohol i can shove in my mouth to keep working lol
> 
> anyway, have a glossary: 
> 
> Ullr - the god of winter (and skiing???). he predates Odinn and such by far
> 
> þing - a law speaking gathering, usually held in the Jarl's hall
> 
> Fenris - .... cmon we all know who that is

The sound of running water on the roof of the hall kept everyone inside the day before they left. The hearths burned out the must leeching through the pitch of the wall joints. The doors were not opened once and there was nothing left to do but sleep.

After dawn crept inland, they gathered from the safe shadows and set on their chase.

Droplets fall from the canopies and patter the shoulders of the travelling company. The rivers have overflown and streams gush from the waterfall into a basin of the ground where the horses pass, trailing through the green currents.

Hux shivers when the far-reaching sprays of the winter cold water catch on his hands. He twists them in his torn sleeves, hooking his fingers on the saddle of Kylo’s stallion.

Even the ravens from the mountainsides are silent – their hoarse croaks have been missed for the most of the day’s journey as the winds fill their absence. Hux swears that he hears Ullr in the peaks of the fir and the larch that is ready to throw down its yellow needles. That strange old God, he wails with the voice that has been dreaded long before Odinn took his throne.

The sun catches between the clouds on the saddle of the horizon, warning that time is short. But the pace remains as Kylo keeps the lead. It is as if he is insistent to travel without haste, confident in his path, but Hux knows that it is the reins slipping out from his maimed right hand that hinder the chase.

When Hux mounted Kylo’s red stallion that morning, the eyes of the company trailed after their backs. They both know the riders whispered when they lagged on the path; they heard the low voices that dipped and fleeted like the murmur of the water under the attention of the company’s chieftain and Hux. But even so, soon the stares began to drift without interest.

 

They keep against the side of a wooded hill beneath its cragged spine, slowly taking the descent between the pines toward the meadows they had seen from height. They must keep the steps of their horses slow and measured while they march through the brambles as the ground remains soft and unsteady. There is only a burnished ripple of light left on the horizon over the flat forest lands when they approach the foot of the hill.

Aching for respite, the company watches from behind the line of sapling pines as shadows hobble on the fields by the cattle flattened paths.

“What do you suppose?” whispered Atli from under the weight of his cowl. “Are they going to the Jarl’s hall for the þing?”

“Look.” Ragni points to the grey frowns of the clouded evening sky. “Look at the smoke! There must be so many fires in the village. It _has_ to be.”

“Then we will avoid this place,” tells them Hux. “Instead—”

“No.” Kylo’s words shake the medallions on the bindings of his face. “We will keep our path to the village.”

Hux stares, his lip twitching as his eyes widen. “Do you not understand?” he spits, leaning over Kylo like a haunting owl. “If they are gathering for the law-speaking, they will hear of Ormarr’s sons!”

The chieftain scoffs, “I doubt it; there are things of higher concern to speak of.” He turns to the company. “After the passing storm we must know which roads are safe to take to reach the hof, so we must attend the þing.”

“It is dangerous,” Hux urges, twisting his hands in the cloak to give Kylo a warning pull.

The rider glances over his shoulder, foreign and shadowed in the darkness of the eve. “Yes,” he says, “and our path will be more so if we do not know.”

Hux bites on his lip and says no more, allowing the company to urge their horses into the fields where they follow the trail of people meandering from the outskirt farmsteads.

With numb hands and tired thoughts, they all unmask themselves, hiding the bindings in their saddle bags so that no one would consider them twice as they pass through the village. Like pathless wretches, they follow the fires toward the hall, watching the people from the bowing saddles of their horses.

The doors of the Jarl’s hall are open and figures throw shadows in the light under the eyes of armed men. The spearheads whisper like reeds and banners snap against the murk clouded sky.

The company divides as five riders dismount in the parting crowds, giving up the reins to those who remain mounted.

Handing the last of the silver to Vikæll and Gunnær, Kylo tells them, “Go to the markets and find who is willing to trade. We will need food that will last until Uppsala.”

The horses are urged forward by the heels of their masters as they shy into the shadows beyond the fires of the hall.

Kylo ascends the steps, trailing behind the warriors of his company, when he becomes aware that Hux had not moved from the place where he abandoned the safety of the red stallion’s saddle.

“Hux?” Kylo calls down as people push around him for the doors. “Hux—?” he repeats, threatful of saying the name any louder as he steps down into the yard.

Hux sighs into the collar of his matted coat as he watches the receding shadows of the horses and the two riders. “We should have gone on,” he says.

Kylo takes Hux by the arm and pulls him on. “Come, we must go inside— You need to warm yourself.”

Standing his ground against Kylo, Hux resists and his boots slip in the damp ground. “I have warned you,” he says, “again and again of danger. I warned you and every time I have watched you fail. I am tired of telling you what you must do to keep us safe if you are not willing to hear me.”

“Hux.” Kylo puts his hands on him in a manner he assumes to be soothing, but even his broad shoulders can’t hide Hux from the crowds. “I understand your fear,” he tells him, as softly as he is able. “But you must understand in turn that I am doing what is best.”

Hux recoils, his face surging with colour as Kylo’s words drown with the ringing inside his head that is too akin to his father’s voice. Hux stares at Kylo, the uneven lines of his face creasing with disgust. He wishes for strength not to rip the brooch from the folds of Kylo’s cowl where he had pinned it the dawn they left and thrust the needle down Kylo’s face.

“Will you come with me? You are cold— I can _see_ your shivers.” Kylo pulls Hux by the hand, like he sees nothing and hears _nothing_ , squeezing his gloved fingers around the frost stung knuckles of Hux’s fist.

Moments pass and the crowds thin. But still, Hux refuses to move under Kylo’s pleas and he is left alone in the yard as Kylo paces up the steps to the hall.

Hux looks down the emptying streets of the jarldom and shivers through his coat, wincing at the chilled air he breathes. He can’t bear any more of this cold – he wants to feel the warmth of burning coals against his skin and the weight of food in his stomach. Hux knows he will not be able chase the steps left behind by Vikæll and Gunnær as their traces have long since been pressed back into the ground.

Hux looks up to the pillared hall. Light drips onto the steps in a golden stream from between the closing doors where the voices of people flow and crash like tidal waves.

The spear bearers watch from their posts as Hux makes his slow steps to the doors. Pain is only a thought when the light promises Hux warmth. He pushes through into the hall with his numb palms and his vision is filled with the backs of the crowded people.

Hux shoulders between the bodies, keeping his head low from the light. He hears the shuffling of soles and the ripples of whispers but sees nothing of the company which he followed.

Footsteps shudder the floor and voices rise as the dais at the head of the hall is taken. Hux falters and halts, filling the gap between men of his equal height. He hears the creak of the seat and glances up between the shoulders. He sees the Jarl and he is like any other: a gaunt man who clings to his place until age or wounds force him down and let his sons claim the name of Jarl.

The attendants call for silence and then, the he speaks.

“I am glad to have all of you here, in my home, in these dark months,” the man calls to the people. “As we prepare the grain, slaughter our stock, we will remember those who had been lost during the year. We will pay in their honour and sacrifice for another successful summer.”

The speech seemed half-hearted, over-practiced, and yet the people cheer, clattering what they have underhand. Spears and fists are lifted into the air with the rise of voices.

The Jarl stands and walks the length of the dais, letting his eyes falter on faces. “Tonight, we will decide how the law will serve us,” he tells them, “and discuss the arrival of the Winter Nights. But, before then, I must speak to you all of the recent news that have arrived at our doors.”

Boots scrape on the timber and stop. The Jarl seems to bow under his own words. “There has been a tragedy in the south. A Jarl, named Ormarr Anarrson, has been slaughtered by a ruthless savage.”

The murmurs rise again like the disturbance of the wind in the canopies of the old pines. Hux turns and tries to push past the bodily masses, but his path is lost as the crowd urges to the dais. The warmth, the safety, it was a trap that edges Hux toward danger.

“Today, we house the sons of Jarl Ormarr as they join us to speak of the man who they hunt.”

Cheering, crying, it all rises into a howl around Hux.

The bright haired sons of Ormarr step onto the dais and clasp hands with the Jarl. They are dressed in hunting gear that is dappled by rain and sprays of muck on the hems of their fine coats of silver and gold thread. Their pale, hungry faces are ruddy as though marked by the blood of their prey and their smiles are bright like the jewels on the pommels of their swords.

The brothers turn to the people of the Jarldom and their faces become solemn.

“Good people!” one of the brothers calls. “We thank you for accepting us. We may be strangers to you, but we will be neighbours in our mourning.”

The other steps forward, perhaps grimmer than his sibling. “Our father, our good… brave father— He was killed in the most cowardly way when he visited the people of the Jarldom named Fjallstad. He intended to marry our sister to the heir of Jarl Brendol. He came with best intentions, wishing to bind together our families and watch them grow.”

“Would you not consider this a noble cause!” one shouts, smiling when the cry gains him cheers from the herds. “Our father was a _good_ man.”

Hux stumbles when he is pushed forward by the eager masses that shout in the cause of the brothers.

“But the husband to be of our sister seemed to have been impatient to claim his own land.” Their tones simmer into cold contemplation as the brothers pace the dais with bowed heads. “So, he slaughtered our father while he slept. The most cowardly way… There is just no honour in that man’s ambition.”

The silence presses onto Hux and he cannot bear his hand away from the hilt of the knife at his hip that presses its ruby pommel against his ribs. He feels like a man broken as he numbly stares down at the feet of the strangers around him as if one glance will break his delusion that he can keep running in this wild hunt.

“He is a weakling, a runt. With skin as white as bone he has red hair like his mother. The last we know he has been travelling with a company of strangers from the west—”

“ _You_!”

Hux shrinks inside his skin and bows as far into the shadows as he can bear. Even the air in his chest feels like theft.

“ _You there_!”

He hears feet rush aside as the man descends from the dais into the crowd. He waits for it, for the guards to grasp for him, for the blades around his throat, for the grey eyes meeting his.

“That brooch at your throat—”

Footsteps halt, spears clatter and voices rise like a shiver. But the man does not speak to Hux; they are separated by the crowd.

“It belongs to the coward of who we spoke. Where did you take it from him?”

“I—”

“Speak quickly!”

Hux lifts his head and stares as the son of Ormarr holds Kylo Ren under the point of his garish sword. The man has blanched under the pale eyes of the heir as he clutches the piece of jewellery at his throat.

“How did this come to you? I demand you tell me!”

Kylo says nothing. Struck dumb, he cannot bring his eyes from the man’s red face that only blooms brighter with every silent moment.

“Speak!” the brother screams, raising the sword with intention behind the swing. “Or I will beat the words from you!”

The people are waiting for blood to stain the hall, carrion crows sitting on broken spears and the sails of beached ships. They wait and shiver with need for the first spill.

“Leave him!”

Grey eyes turn into the crowd as a stranger pushes through, wild and weather worn. He stumbles as people part for him and the hood of his torn coat falls from his red hair.

“Leave it,” he rasps and takes the blade pointed to Kylo’s throat with his bare palms, pushing it aside. “He has nothing to do wi—”

“ _Guards_!” the son of Ormarr screams.

Hux chokes on his words as he is grasped by his arms and throat, forced to bow in front of the heir. He crumbles onto his knees, seizing with pain when he pressed to the floor – blood pulses warm through his clothes when the crusted scabs of his wounds break. The pole of a spear thumps on Hux’s skull and his teeth scratch of the boards.

The anticipating silence of the hall becomes rucked by footsteps that draw around Kylo.

“You helped this—This vermin… Escape? You planned this? You helped this murderer?”

“I… I didn’t know who this man was,” Kylo stutters and buckles under the stares. “I swear!”

Hux wants to kick him for how weak he sounds. Kylo is pathetic, even when he is lying to avoid the blade point. Hux will curse Kylo to his dying moment for having no strength in his words as he disowns his knowledge of Hux.

“Then how did you come to have this?” Fingers flick on the brooch.

“He gave it to me— As payment—! For the passage north. It’s all he had! Please— Please believe me. I am only a stranger here, I mean nothing against you.”

Silence is heavy around them and Hux yields nothing as he is kept against the floor with hands gripping his body.

“Will you give up this man to me so that I may take my revenge?” It is not a question, not truly. The heirs of Ormarr will carry this sentence whether Kylo agrees or not.

“Yes— Yes, he is yours! I have nothing to do with him. Just let me go on my way.”

In his furious ecstasy, Hux thinks the heir will run Kylo down on the spears of his men as he rears to leave. He laughs, muffled against the timber, at the image of Kylo being gutted with spearheads. But he is not satisfied as the son of Ormarr steps away from the foreigner.

“For bringing this vile creature, I pardon you and let you leave safely. But you will not falter for even a moment in this Jarldom once you leave those doors.”

“—Thank you, my lord!” Kylo cries like a shunned dog. Hux has never heard him sound this way – so _weak_. “I will not forget your kindness!”

“Remember your debt and go!”

The doors of the hall open and Kylo flees as the cold air enters. The floors shudder with trampling feet as figures follow out after Kylo, escaping for the night air and its chill.

Hux spits as he is lifted to his feet. He writhes like a wild animal and does not care for the stares and the pitying sneers. He meets the heir’s eyes and grins when his hair is clutched in a grip that tries to force him to remain still.

“What a pathetic creature,” notes the pale man. He is joined by his reflection of a brother that stands behind with wide curious eyes that gauge Hux for blood on his bruised face. “We are truly doing a merciful thing, by ending this life.”

“Yes. Within several days… We will offer his life as a sacrifice for the Gods when dísablót comes.”

Hux screams and spits in the faces of the brothers as he is taken from the hall. Out of reach of the light, a fist meets his throat and chokes the curses. A knee breaks against his stomach and he collapses. He does not know how many more times he is broken to the ground, but Hux only shows his bloodied teeth as he is thrown down the stairs.

Out by the edge of the farmsteads, he is brought to the four walls of a hut that will serve as his prison. As he is handled, the curses leave Hux’s lips slower and slower like drying sap until there is nothing left to draw from his mouth.

Left to the damp ground of the hut, he kneels at the door that is stationed by a guard. For reasons he can’t grasp, he moans and weeps. He cries until he is bowed over by his own pity and his head meets the floor.

As the tears quiet on his bruised face and the cold fills the spaces inside Hux, he wonders if Kylo Ren and the riders have gone. They will arrive in Uppsala within days if they keep their pace and the oncoming winter does not hinder them. They will find the hof where their journey will end, where Kylo will give himself to the Gods. If that is… his destiny— Of course it will be, for the self-important fool.

Hux laughs to the quiet of the hut. He will be given to the Gods on the same day as Kylo. He only hopes that if they enter Valholl, he will find Kylo during the battles All-Father hosts and have his chance to sentence his anger onto Kylo. Again and again, until he is satisfied— Until time ends.

That coward. That _useless_ creature.

Hux would not have hated him if Kylo gave him away with at least the dignity worthy praise.

The lock of the door shudders.

Hux seats himself up slowly from where he sat bowed against the ground, keeling on the pain of his broken leg. He blinks at the light peeking between the boards of the door. The hinges creak and struggle against the cold.

No armed man glances through the open crack, no spear point, no blade. It’s just a girl, holding up the husk of a candle to the air as she looks at the mangled remains of a man on the floor.

Hux thinks he recognises her – the small face and freckled cheeks. He is almost certain that the sharp, angry eyes are known to him.

“Hux,” the girl says, opening the door into the hut wide. She is alone. No one waits behind her. “Can you walk?” she asks.

He tries to find words, mulling them over on his tongue. But the girl does not have patience for his weakness.

“We must go,” she insists, stepping inside the hut and bringing the light with her. “You have until morning.”

With the girl’s wide eyes on him, Hux climbs to his unsteady feet and steps out of the enclosure meant until his death. He looks out onto the empty crossroad where the building stands and sees no guards.

“Come on,” the girl whispers as she slips under Hux’s arm. “We must go.”

The girl slips into the dark, blowing the candle dead as she bundles her shawl around her arms. Hux follows her, tripping and pausing for a breath of air when his ribs ache against the skin like they wish to break and his bruised-broken leg begs for rest.

The girl runs through the pastures below the incline of the village like a mouse foraging for grain – her little feet in clumsy shoes pounding the earth, taming it to her soles. Hux admires her virility, forgetting to care where she leads him through the dark hinterlands.

The cold is sharp, like their footsteps in the dreaded winter silence. Rucked soils of the farmed fields crunches under their feet, giving up their haunt as they steal to the edges of the village.

The girl stops, sucking air through her teeth. “Go on further, past the wall. Go until you see the last of the farmsteads. They will wait for you.”

The girl goes to leave Hux to his path, but pauses and tilts her small braid bundled head toward him. “I did not do this because I wanted to help you, or because they asked me,” she tells the vagabond. “I did it for her. You saved her, even if you didn’t want to.”

The girl, the little thrall with eyes of iron, slips past Hux and runs through the grass like the whisper of a dream.

He leaves through the gates of the bowed timber walls, unhindered, and keeps walking through the sightless dark – mind wandering past his intention and future. He loses himself in the muted thoughts of how long the dark will last and if his stomach will forever remain empty.

Soon enough, even the road from the Jarldom crumbles to nothing under the grass as the pastures beyond the reach of the village begin. Ahead, the woods will wait and Hux does not know how he will overcome their breach.

A whistle, like the wing of a bird, comes from up ahead. Hux stops in his plodding steps and watches the eye of a torch wink from the black hills. He waits and a second appears. They dance like malformed eyes. Deliriously, he wonders if Fenris has broken his chains and stalks these fens in wait of his father. Hux laughs. Two prisoners alike they will be, then.

A third light blinks and Hux drags his feet in the grass as he turns and stumbles against the rise of the hill. He walks, bearing his aches and exhaustion as a weight that has turned his shoulders numb.

He walks, and the fires drift nearer until he fathoms the faces they keep in their light. He stops and does not hold back his grimace as every part of him coils to scream.

A light wavers as a figure drops from the high mount of a horse whose hide runs like blood in the shadows. Boots kick through the winter maimed grass and Hux is grasped by hands that pull him into arms that threaten to take what strength is left to him, keeping him against the wide breadth of a chest.

“They are gone. They are all gone.” The words circle Hux’s head as they are whispered beside his ear. “We left no one. They are gone— I promise.”

“Kylo—” Hux slurs.

Arms drop away and in the light, he sees the blinks of silver and gold on Kylo’s shoulders. Even in the dark, the gold beaten medallions shine like a coat of suns.

Something whispers over Hux’s head and he turns to catch the glimmer of silver cloth that hooks on his neck and pulls him into a kiss that is just a smear of warm lips. The sigh from Kylo is echoed by tired surrounding laughter.

If Kylo had intended an apology, an answer, the words are beaten from him by the fist to his stomach. The man swallows his tongue as he hunches over before he is knocked to the ground by an elbow to his back.

Hux does not stop, not even when he is biting his own pain by kicking Kylo. He drags him across the grass by the coat and digs his foot into the convulsing ribs before dropping over the beaten man, grabbing his head by the knotted hair.

“I hate you,” Hux hisses, shacking Kylo’s head in his grip. Those dumb heartful eyes stare up at him through thick tears. “You hear me?” he repeats. “I hate you!”

Their kisses are not forgiveness and the bruises will ache. But Kylo holds Hux through the ugly words, tasting tears between them, until they are both empty and tired of anger.

 

 

 

 


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AT LAST IM DONE W THIS SHIT SHOW! this fic was a story and a half to deal w, im gonna miss it but im glad its over. a huge thank you to [cracktheglasses](http://cracktheglasses.tumblr.com/) for helping me decide how to finish this story off
> 
> here is a [work playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/blessedbytheash/playlist/4hAU5THTlCaYhzPXV0murA?si=6BWrGaznQJCYddOwk5fNYA) of music i skipped between while writing (tip: listen to it on shuffle)
> 
> trigger warnings???: brief mention of animal death, some violence and very very unsafe and unhygienic sex
> 
> EDIT: forgot to mention that out of all chapters this is the one in which i dropped all attempts at historical accuracy bc i cant find any accounts for the hof of uppsala which arent written by christians or some how piled w aesthetics. so i just went w the most popular account of uppsala w a grain of something something taken from a certain tv show *COUGH*

Yellow larch needles are falling in the banners of sunlight, spinning in the forest of walled shadows. The needles fall and dip into the water that runs trails in the soft ground down the slope of the wooded hill and the stone steps that meander among the leaning flanks of the black larches from the pillars of the hof.

Figures ascend in a swell of voices, leaning against the cold on the steps with their bundled backs. The horses and the carts have been left at the hill’s foot where masses string together as they let their eyes lift to the gilded rooftop of Uppsala’s hall that cuts apart the yellow canopy of the larches.

The air pulls tight inside Kylo’s chest as he looks down from the bend of the steps. His clothes are heavy on him, weighed by the boiled leather armour and the stones and medallions stitched into the patchwork of golden thread under the black travel rags. Kylo’s eyes are kept from the stinging wind by the rough burlap of his cowl that he pulls across his mouth and nose, tugging against the copper pin that keeps the cloth in place. He breathes warm air through the stitches and watches the steps flicker between the feet of the climbing hordes. He turns.

Holding their backs against the wind, the Danir vagabonds stands with marks of their deeds woven into their clothes. Jewelled pommels hang and richly made fabrics of silk, wool and cotton peek from between their malformed cloaks and cowls. Golden armrings clack on their wrists.

The light pales and larch needles flutter on the rushing breeze. Hux’s eyes are near white in the ambiance of the day. His reddened lips are hidden by the fold of silver-red fabric that Kylo had dressed around him – to replace the grey cowl that clings around his neck still.

Hux does not look at Kylo. His forehead is creased as he stares outward onto the winter-light sky. Kylo would kiss him, but he will not risk his good stance with the cruel Svear.

“Come,” says Kylo, tugging Hux’s elbow as he pushes between Ragni and Vikæll toward the crowded steps.

Cattle bells ring from the poles bound with ribbon and banners on the crest of the wooded hill. Ropes snap when the larches and pines shift, creaking against their knots. Kylo watches the tethered rope spine catch the prime light – empty, in waiting.

The gilded heads of sea creatures rise from the scalded roof of the hof, dusted with larch needles that lie like a shedding of hair. People are grouped at the doors, their murmurings halted by the light of the fires that touch them from within the hall.

The shadows of the idols stand above the people as they enter, their contorted faces lost in the rafters. They do not need to be seen for the crowded below to know their names.

Kylo passes the threshold of the hof, peering out from under the hem of his cowl, cold-torn lips open as he stares.

A weight presses against Kylo’s shoulder as Hux uses him for convenience as he attempts to steady his breath – his maimed leg thrown awkwardly out beside him. His eyes are narrow and nose red, flared as it labours with air. The broken bone of his leg has been aggravated, but Hux does not voice this.

The Danir warriors mill, nudging and clicking with laughter. Kylo ignores them, watching Hux’s white-pink hands pinch the fabrics of his sleeve – skin broken and dirty, bruised purple from the cold.

“Let’s go,” Hux’s breath hushes drily as he moves past Kylo, unwinding his fingers.

Lumbering forward with his stiff leg, Hux pulls cloth tighter around his face, coupling the red of his cheeks and the cowl. Kylo follows him, moving between the cloistered figures of families and neighbours urging together toward the goði who holds his arms out in the light of fires set around the dais, possibly reaching to the timber idols or asking for quiet.

Kylo stands beside Hux, beneath Freyr’s shadow as bone garlands clack against bronze medallions overhead. The silver thread of Hux’s cowl shines as he turns, opening his mouth to speak, but his words are overwhelmed when the goði calls out.

Kylo turns with wide eyes, back and fists tense as though he is the sole attendant. He is not aware of drifting from Hux, standing in the light of the goði’s fires.

 

“What will you do, afterwards?”

“What do you mean?”

Ragni is stood at Kylo’s side beneath the hall’s overhang. The sun is gone, but their backs remain burnished by the hof’s fires. Kylo is clothed in a stiff white tunic that reaches his knees, his hands are lined with blood. He has been accepted by the goði – honoured among the other men and women who have come to be taken by the Gods.

“What will you decide to do with my body?” Kylo asks the warrior. She has become sicklier tone of white in the last days, though her hair has grown and her hands remain steady when they bear their steel. Kylo will not worry of this.

Ragni considers, looking down onto the tent coated hill slope; there are fires between the pines and food signed smoke lingers in the still air. She shrugs.

“Will you burn me?” Kylo urges her. “Or will you demand a mound, filled with shields and hounds at my feet—”

“I will leave your body to be festered by carrion birds. They will make a meal of your tongue and stomach. The rest, the foxes and weasels can have.”

Kylo does not see her smiling, but he hears the smirk. “Was that Hux’s choice?”

“I am certain it will please him.”

Ragni and Kylo watch lights patter between the trees on the path to the hof. They hear Vikæll and Shirin, the snap of Hux’s voice silencing them. They can’t see the troop, pulling apart the saddle bags to pull tents between the larch some way from the hof, by the clearing where a large fire is kept.

Kylo steps from the timber rise of the hall, his bare feet meeting the cold, wet earth.

The company plots their fires, voices unmuted by the loom of the oncoming days. Their joy is unfaltering and when Kylo reaches them, their hands clasp on the white wool of his tunic to appraise him.

“You will feast tomorrow, until your stomach is bursting and you are drowning in your drink—”

“And dance—! Even if you hate it, I will pull you in and dance until our feet burn and bleed—”

The smile pulling sourly on Kylo’s lips he can’t resist. He lets hands tug on him, embrace him. His arms hang stiff at Shirin’s sides as the small woman holds him giddily before letting him into Atli’s cheers.

“Finally, they will be free of your idiocy,” comes a hiss beside Kylo’s ear when he is at last free from holding arms.

Kylo turns when Hux speaks again, “The Gods have accepted your offering, haven’t they?”

“Did you ever doubt it?” Kylo reaches for the silk and shell shard cuff of Hux’s rich tunic that Kylo took himself from the coffers at the foot of the bed where slept Ormarr’s eldest heir. He pulls on the silk, but it slips from his fingers.

“I had every reason to.”

Kylo smiles at Hux’s spite. “You are still questioning my decisions, and yet we are here. Aren’t we?”

Hux steps from Kylo, turning to walk out of the circle of belongings. “You say that as if it is assuring.”

“You are angry with me.” Kylo follows Hux’s hobbled steps.

“I _have_ my reasons.” The words escape Kylo as Hux charges ahead, slipping on the coating of larch needles on the rain softened ground that cakes the soles of Kylo’s bare feet.

“Will you force me to leave without forgiveness?”

“Is that so difficult to believe.”

Kylo’s teeth scratch together as he throws a hand forward to grab Hux by the elbow of his sleeve, jerking him back by one slipping step. Hux turns with a fist raised, warning Kylo aside, but the scraped knuckles are only pushed down.

“What do you want me to do,” Kylo demands of him, “to make you stop speaking to me like a scorned wife? I left you with no enemies. I kept you safe.”

“And be assured, Kylo Ren,” Hux tells him with a distorting grimace on his ashen face, “that I am _eternally_ grateful.”

“What do you want me to do!” Kylo shouts once his grip falls loose and Hux is free to walk from him.

“I haven’t decided yet!” Hux calls sparingly over his shoulder.

Kylo forces air through his teeth. “Then where are you going!”

“To piss, you invasive child!”

 

 

Pavilions have been pulled over the ground around the hof, covering any glimpse of the black earth between the trees. Frost has crusted the larches and the ropes tethering the tents, creaking with the passing wind.

Kylo watches the stretched roof of waxed linen sway on a spine of thick rope. Daylight makes his eyes ache and he wishes to sleep again, but he cherishes the silence that keeps it heavy hold for a while longer.

Kylo breathes into the collar of his wool shirt that has bunched high around his neck and listens to the humming snore beside him. He keeps a hand on Hux’s bare back, rubbing on the bruises and old scabs between the ribs with his thumb. Kylo tilts his head toward him, his cheek touching the cold fabric of the folded clothes that serve for pillows.

He does not know how much good the killing of Ormarr’s sons had truly done. Perhaps their kin will reinforce the bounty, or Brendol will try to keep his honour. Kylo should have sent Hux to the Danir, to his mother’s Jarldom. She, for certain, would have not turned him for the price placed on his head.

Bitterness cinches over Kylo. Did it even matter when his mother discovered his absence? It is not as though they were anything more than strangers when Kylo left.

Would it be the same to his father? He had not seen him since previous winter, when Han was hindered in the Jarldom by the snow and ice on the rivers that kept his boat tethered to the bank. Kylo does not know where the merchant has now gone wondering, or how long it will be before he hears of his dead son.

Kylo’s nail scratches on an ill healing scab at the base of Hux’s back and the man flinches, hissing. Hux’s auburn head sinks under the covers as he shifts away.

“Sorry,” mutters Kylo into the collar of his shirt. He reaches to brush his hand over Hux’s back, but he finds him bowing away from the touch.

Kylo drops his hand, listening to Hux settle to sleep again.

 

 

The smell of scorched fat oils the air and leaves lungs heavier breath by breath. Voices are busy between the sound of feet on the soft ground and spitting fires. The heat of the melding bodies keeps the frost thawed on the crushed grass and bark and the excitement of it all has left no room for the dark.

The taste of blood settled at the back of his throat makes Kylo scrunch his lips and halt his breathing while his tongue works around the thick clumps. A ribbon of golden thread across his forehead itches and the crusted ash on his cheeks has crumbled down his silver and white tunic.

A woman, dressed no different to Kylo, wipes at her lips, spreading the red stain as she pushes out from between the white clothed bodies of the sacrifices. She looks as though she means to retch the moment she leaves the eyes of the goði.

“Go, indulge in your last pleasures,” instructs the goði with humour as he observes the men and women. “Do what you must with your final night.”

It isn’t long before Kylo is holding a cup to his lips and near-boiling wine is dribbling down his chin as he swallows. When the liquid gushes into his throat, he thinks he can still taste the blood. It was a lamb whose throat they cut. It was so young he thought its flesh ought to have the taste of ripened fruit and berries.

Excitement has held Kylo from eating and drink does not take long to weight down his head, loosening his control as the wine continues to run from the corners of his lips. The polished horn cup drops to the ground when Kylo is pulled forward by his arms toward people he does not recognise. Music is thunder that has plunged down through the canopies to shake the feet of the dancers.

Kylo refuses their hands for the scorching ale that scrapes his tongue with its strength. He drinks heavily and feels his face burn in the firelight. Everything softly drains of focus and Kylo forgets the feeling of his limbs as he is dragged into the movement of the masses between the fires.

Drinking and eating without realising his mouth had ever opened, Kylo is unaware of the night passing. He is pulled into dances, kissed and plied with scorching, rancid mead that makes his throat cinch. He no longer recognises faces or feels as he is passed between hands that pull away his clothes despite the winter’s bite that gnaws his bare chest.

Kylo slips on the cloyed earth, falling from hands and laughter to land on his back and ass. He gulps on his tongue as he grasps the cold sludge in his palms. His feet slide as he tries to move, and his head drags in the dirt. He is a maimed animal struggling on the ground, moaning and bleating, until he is hoisted onto his bare feet.

Kylo falls forward, grinning to his own moronic fortune as his teeth collide with a crown of red hair. He is pulled back by the nape of his neck and is seized by pale eyes that shrink him under their stare.

“Hux,” Kylo thinks he says – he isn’t certain.

He is dragged out from the clustering bodies that heave with the smell of drink and sweat, to the shadows under the larches where Hux holds him to his mouth. They kiss with slack lips and scratching teeth as damp hands clutch to clothes and skin. Hux bites on Kylo’s neck that stinks of old sweat as he shoves his fingers against Kylo’s tongue – holding him in place.

“I want to fuck you,” Hux’s hoarse voice beats against Kylo’s ear as he licks it and scratches with his teeth. “You hear me? I want to fuck you, wretched bitch.”

Kylo is smiling and his eyes are drooping. He is nodding, trying to return a kiss but something is shoved against his lips – dry and hard. He tries to push it aside, to find Hux’s lips, but it is insistently pushed toward him.

“ _Eat_ ,” Hux grits. “I won’t have you collapsing the moment I have my cock inside you.”

Kylo barely tastes the bitterness on his tongue as he swallows and almost chokes. But Hux holds him by the jaw to tilt his neck and kiss him until the sharp lump passes down Kylo’s throat.

Shaking, hardly breathing, he follows Hux, failing to keep his hands away as he smears black sludge across his fine clothes. Hux leads them to the slouched shadow of the tent they had shared and darkness tears over Kylo as he is thrown onto the scattered covers of rough wool inside.

Kylo slips on the bunched fabrics, his face dragging across them, as breath burns against his ear.

“I won’t let you go without a mark of me on every part of your body,” Hux whispers as the heat of him lays over Kylo’s back, pressing him down until he keens.

Colours spark like embers when Kylo closes his eyes to the darkness. Hands burrow into his remaining clothes, picking at the stitches like carrion birds. Mud is scrubbed from his back with the shreds of his trousers and his dirtied feet scrunch when he feels Hux’s mouth brand the base of his back. He is barely aware of his cock aching against his stomach – weighing like iron as Hux pushes apart his thighs, scratching the saddle calloused skin.

Kylo sees nothing but the fire casted shadows on the waxed linen of the tent. He wants to watch the rage of Hux’s eyes, he wants to see his grimaces if it should be the last time.

Kylo slumps onto his side, dragging his legs out from around Hux who has turned away, only becoming aware of Kylo’s ploy once a damp foot clips his shoulder. Aimless legs wrap around the width of Hux’s torso and urge him forward. The darkness becomes the cradle for the sounds of damp kisses and drained breaths as something liquid gulps and drips.

Red sparks in Kylo’s eyes, flushing in blue waves, when a wet hand covers his cock and a tongue drag on his chest. His hands are in Hux’s clothes, scrunching the beading and pulling his hair as he lies underneath him.

The head of Kylo’s cock slips from Hux’s hand to knead the juncture of his thigh, pressing down to hear him sigh, before reaching to cup the curve of his ass. Kylo laughs, uncaring, as the wet thumb presses down inside him, slicked by something that hangs a heavy smell over Kylo’s mind.

Skin and muscle is pried by Hux’s thumb, replaced by fingers that make Kylo’s chin tremble. They press into the warmth, pushing inwards until Hux’s palm is strained. Kylo thinks he will cry with the scorching underneath his skin as he aches for the perverse pressure of Hux’s fingers inside him.

Kylo’s thighs ache— When did two become three—? When did he begin to kiss Hux? A moment that could have been days and Kylo is being stuffed full, he is laughing, and his eyes are aching with tears. Hux had not taken the moment to shake off his clothes and he hangs over Kylo like the weight of darkness, grunting into his neck as he fucks him – branding him, shaping him for his need—

Apart from his body and melded at once, Kylo watches the space between them, where he sees the silhouette of Hux’s cock pushing inside him. He reaches down, ignoring his own ache, and Hux hisses, keeling over him, when fingers lock around the girth.

Kylo is thrown back against the sprawled covers by hands on his shoulders that reach for his wrists and wrench them. Kylo wheezes, laughing as Hux forces him to contort with a palm on the back of his knee. Kylo does not know his own voice as it comes in distorted sharp gasps and grunts that overcome the wet, soft sounds of their fucking.

Forgetting how to force his lungs out of their convulsing stupor, Kylo shakes and drops his head back with his mouth open like a wound. He sees the blur of Hux’s pale face, burning with red across his cheeks and lips. Hux’s eyes squeeze shut when his hips shunt sharply into Kylo’s body. His continues to tip forward as heat pools somewhere inside Kylo. He grabs for Hux’s waist, squeezing it as Kylo feels his hips rock against his split thighs—

Kylo drops lax, hands and legs spasming. His limp cock is wet against his stomach – cold. A sound and the touch of a palm against his inner thigh warns Kylo of warmth leaving his body—

Time bulges and shrinks— Kylo attempts to recall Hux throwing aside his coat. Water dribbles down his chin. Kylo did not see when the flask was pressed to his lips—

Colours ooze like sap through the fabric of the tent. Words are muttered against Kylo’s shoulder, but they have no meaning.

He turns and eyes stare at him in the haze like malachite made molten in the still pool of shadows contained inside the tent. Kylo does not understand. He opens his mouth, but he can only grunt like a muted animal.

Darkness throbs in Kylo’s eyes and he sinks like iron in the river.

 

 

The covers are matted with sweat that Kylo breathes in the stifled air of the tent. Overnight, the dirt had dried on his skin and now it itches on the hairs of his legs and flakes of rust crust his palms.

Kylo grunts out of a breath, forcing his feverish eyes open in the haze of the stretched linen. He scrapes the muck of his spit from his teeth with his numb tongue, swallowing on the rancid taste. When Kylo attempts to sit up in the blankets, he feels like the putrefied hide of an animal drooping from the bones.

Dawn must have only reached the horizon with the dullness of the light hanging over Kylo as he pulls on a shirt he finds in the saddle bags. His legs bend with ache as he climbs into saddle worn trousers and fits his bare feet into boots – there will yet be time for cleaning before he proceeds to the hof.

Kylo undoes the ties of the tent flaps and falters outside. His feet leave marks in the shedding of snow left from the night and his knees buckle. Yet, he walks.

Traces of the fires and the dances stain the ground with slushed mud between the pines. The hill slope appears emptier than before, silent. A fog has lifted from the forest onto the hill and shadows of the pavilions hang in the distance – somehow meeker than the night Kylo watched them rise.

Rope creaks from the trees like masts. Kylo lifts his bleak face to the swinging shadows by the canopies, hidden from him by the wafting murk of the fog. The snow is spotted by red like scattered berries that trace to the dark frozen pool at the steps of the hof. He knows there are eyes peering down on him from the branches – like Odinn, searching for the runes.

Hard soled feet stutter on the frost. Kylo turns as Shirin halts with Atli beside her. The inhuman shadows of the riders stand away from them, cloaked by the shifting curls of fog.

“Kylo—” Atli raises his voice. “We m—”

“Where is Hux?” Kylo’s voice is shaken – a fist that can’t bear its own judgment. His eyes burn as he stares between the two silent faces. “ _Where_ did he _go_ —!”

“No need for such anger.”

The man sounds calm, satisfied. Stood among the riders, as comfortable among their cloaked shoulders as he could ever be.

In the silence, Kylo moves like a charging horse and Hux does not veer – even when a fist closes on his throat and his face is crushed by Kylo’s brow.

Thrashed like a misbehaving dog, Hux is thrown down onto the frozen larch needles away from the riders – skidding on his back across the frost. Kylo collapses on his knees over Hux, gathering the front of his coat and yanking the grinning man up.

“You did this on purpose,” Kylo grunts, his face numb with anger.

Dazed by the blow, Hux forces his eyes onto Kylo against the pale sky cutting into the canopy and licks his teeth to speak. “I did,” he tells him. “Didn’t think twice when I stuffed my fingers into your mouth, did you?”

A fist striking past Hux’s cheek pins him to the ground – torn from the grip on his neck. He groans, blood paints his lip from a fine swelling cut.

“Why?” Kylo demands. The answer does not come quick enough and Kylo thrashes Hux by the collar of his shirt, knocking his head against the ground. The thumps are sickening and Hux is heaving like a drowning beast, but Kylo does not stop as he screams, “ _Why!_ ”

Brown-red spit drools from Hux’s mouth. He wipes it away with his knuckles and stares up at Kylo with ice shattered eyes. “You wanted my forgiveness,” he says. “I only gave you what you wished for.”

Kylo stands, lifting Hux with him. Nobody hinders the vagabond when he grasps Hux by the naked throat and thrusts his fist like a dagger to his gut. He chokes and crumples around Kylo who remains impassive as he feels the wet gulping of Hux’s lungs against his fist.

A shot of blood runs from Hux’s nose when Kylo’s cranium collides with it. His eyes roll back and the swipe of a foot lands him on the ground.

Hux must have expected this, having denied Kylo his wish to depart on the Winter Nights with his blood as the gift to the Æsir. He must have known how it would hurt him. Perhaps, that is why he has not lifted a hand to defend himself and only laughs, coughing on the bloodied spit, as he rolls onto his knees like a whipped dog.

“Is that enough for you?” Kylo heaves as he holds himself from raising a hand again.

Hux slowly gathers himself and stands. His face is red from the dawning bruises as he turns to Kylo, his knees and chest are covered in the snow. He inspects Kylo with a grin of someone who has lost all care for his demise.

Hux steps forward and snatches Kylo’s jaw into his hand, keeping him in place as he is kissed, tasting the rancid bitterness of his sleep. “You think this was the punishment?” he sneers against the purse of Kylo’s startled lips. “I will keep you as mine until I have determined it is time.”

Hux kisses him again with a snarl embedded to Kylo’s tongue and then releases him, pushing his slack body away.

“Come!” Hux commands to the company, turning from Kylo. “We have wasted enough of the day—” The horses are reared at his demand by the riders in the misted copse. They are ignorant to Kylo’s stare.

Everything is flayed of colour in the in the fog of the evening except for the spur of auburn that strikes from beneath Hux’s loosened cowl. It is trivial and insignificant to Kylo, but, for a moment, he thinks he sees the malachite eyes of yesterday when the man turns. The burnished colouring is the fire Loþtr fed with his jealousy and it is only made truer by the bruises aching on Kylo’s skin.

“Dress yourself, quickly!” Hux urges him, holding the reins of the horse Kylo recognises for his own. “We have far to go.”

The Gods must be staking their fun, Kylo decides, as they watch him witlessly stare across the fog muffled copse. To think that this mortal, pathetically insignificant man refused their judgment. To think that _Hux_ tore him from fate.

The pines creak with the ache of the weight hanging from their branches. Greying in the eves light, the hanging bodies are no more than the cattle, hounds and goats that are strung from the larches down the hill from the hof where the bells ring out from the dull shadows.

Kylo knows that he ought to be there, bound hands raised in a plea, a spear cutting through his stomach. But he has been pulled from this fate and, perhaps, it will not be long before he converges again on this decision. Kylo knows it will be his path, and Hux will be there to meet him with bloodied hands, holding the steel thrusted into Kylo’s body that accepts his judgment gladly.

 

 

 

 


End file.
